


Sleepwalker

by pterawaters



Series: Mr. Sandman [8]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Asexual Will Byers, Canon-Typical Violence, Eleven | Jane Hopper is a Byers, Established Relationship, Family Dynamics, Insomnia, It's not a season of Stranger Things unless Steve gets beat up, Jonathan Byers Has Powers, Long-Distance Relationship, Moving, Multi, Near Death Experiences, Nightmares, Polyamory, Post-Season/Series 03, Psychic Abilities, Siblings Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper, Superpowers, Will Byers Has Powers, sorry I don't make the rules - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:33:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 14
Words: 54,452
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21583837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pterawaters/pseuds/pterawaters
Summary: After Hopper’s death, Joyce Byers decides to move to a new town, taking her children (those born to her and those adopted) with her. El goes to school for the first time, finds a special connection with Will, and learns what it means to have big brothers. Nancy learns how to cope with sleeping on her own. Jonathan does whatever he needs to in order to protect the people he loves. And Steve is just trying to survive until Thanksgiving.
Relationships: Jonathan Byers/Nancy Wheeler, Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington, Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, Will Byers & Eleven | Jane Hopper
Series: Mr. Sandman [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1527764
Comments: 100
Kudos: 200





	1. The Announcement

**Author's Note:**

> We're entering uncharted territory here, folks! We've just about hit the end of (current) canon, and I'm really excited for you guys to read what I've come up with.
> 
> If you haven't read the previous installments of this series, it's not required that you read them to be able to enjoy this fic, but I would definitely recommend it. 
> 
> The Underage tag is used here due to inclusion of explicit content between 17- and 18-year-olds. Specific chapters will have other warnings, which I will place in the notes section of those chapters.

**_August 1985_ **

Jonathan found a note taped on his door when he left his room one Tuesday morning. It was still summer, and he didn’t have work (back at the grocery store and not the paper, sadly) that day, so he’d slept in. The note said, “Family meeting, today, 6 pm.” He looked down the hallway and saw the same note on Will’s door, and another on the wall next to the draped-off dining room that had become El’s bedroom for the past month.

Huh.

On his way back from using the bathroom and grabbing a bowl of cereal for breakfast, Jonathan brought the note back into his room. He stuck it on the inside of the door, then sat down at the foot of the bed, paging through a magazine as he ate.

Behind him, Nancy groaned. “Why are you eating so loud?”

“I was hungry,” he said, turning to face her. “You want some?”

“Mmph,” she groaned, flopping back down, but next to her Steve turned over.

“I’m starving!” Steve said, sitting up and taking the bowl when Jonathan offered it.

“Ugh, you eat loud too,” Nancy said, putting her pillow over her head. From under there she added something like, “Boys are gross and I hate them.”

“That is _not_ what you were saying last night, Babe,” Steve said through his mouthful of cereal, making Jonathan laugh. Looking at the note, Steve asked, “Hey, what’s that? Family meeting?”

“I think mom must have put them up before she left for work,” Jonathan told him, scooting closer so he could trade off using the spoon. “She picked the one night this week where none of us is working.”

“I miss working at the paper,” Nancy said, coming out from under her pillow with a pout. 

“They treated you like garbage and your boss tried to kill you,” Steve said. “Cleaning classrooms can’t be worse than that, can it?”

“Do you know how many pieces of gum middle schoolers chew over the course of a school year?” Nancy asked, taking the bowl from Steve and helping herself to a bit. “It’s so gross.”

“It’s gotta be better than mowing lawns out in the sun all day,” Steve said. “Oh! That reminds me. Robin said she had a lead on some jobs at the video store. I think we’re gonna apply.”

“That’s great,” Jonathan told him, glad to see Steve getting out there and making a plan. 

When six o’clock rolled around, everyone gathered at the little kitchen table. Joyce looked around at the five of them, and said, “I need to tell you guys something.”

“What?” Will asked her, and El put her arms around herself. Nancy grasped Jonathan’s hand and held it under the table. 

“I’m selling the house.” Joyce told them, and it took Jonathan a few seconds to really process what she was saying. Sell the house? She couldn't sell the house! Why would she sell the house? Was it money? It _had_ taken her a bit to find a new job after Melvald's closed.

“If-if you need help with the mortgage,” Jonathan told her. “I can help!”

“I can help too,” Steve told her. “I don’t _have_ to go to school this year. I can work more instead.”

“Boys, no,” Joyce said gently. “It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?” Jonathan thought Will looked as blindsided and almost betrayed as he felt. 

“I’ve decided we’re going to leave Hawkins.”

_What?_

Joyce took a deep breath before continuing. “I–I’ve found a job in Springfield.”

“Illinois?” Jonathan asked, holding desperately to Nancy’s hand and sharing a worried look with Steve.

“Yes, Illinois. Look, I know this place is your home,” she said, reaching out for Will. “But so much has happened here. And it doesn't fit us anymore. I just– I want a place we can fill up with happy memories, you know? _Just_ happy memories.”

Jonathan could kind of understand that, but what he couldn’t accept was moving away from Nancy. And what if Steve didn’t move with them? That would leave Jonathan cut off from both of them. The thought made his _bones_ hurt. “Mom…”

"Where is Springfield?" El asked, a worried look on her face as well. "Is it near Chicago?"

"No, sweetie, it's not," Joyce told her, and for some reason, this made El relax. "It's not that big a city, and we'll live kind of outside the city proper."

"You already have a place picked out, don't you?" Jonathan asked, really wondering why this was the first he was hearing about it. Shouldn’t Joyce have been talking to them throughout the whole process? Why did she have to do this now? Did she hate this place _that much_? “I can’t believe you!”

“I know it’s going to be hard,” she said, a tense edge in her voice. “But do you really think I would be doing this if it wasn’t for the best?”

Jonathan lost some of his ire. “Well...no.”

Looking down, Joyce licked her lips. “Jim and I talked about it, before he… well, _before_. We figured it would be easier to start again, to move forward in a place where no one knew us. And I’d–” Jonathan watched his mother lose, then quickly regain her composure. “I’d really like to honor him this way.”

“When do we have to move?” Will asked, his tone straightforward and practical. Jonathan missed the little boy with too much imagination he used to be. 

“The new house will be ready at the end of the month. We’ll get there just in time for the new school year to start.”

In a small voice, El asked, “Can I go to school?”

Joyce sat down, putting a hand on El’s arm. “ _Yes_. It might be a difficult transition for you, but if you want to give it a shot, I’m behind you 100 percent.”

El smiled, and it broke Jonathan’s heart. Of course she deserved to be able to go to school, like any other kid. A move to a new city was the best way to make that happen. Jonathan wanted that for her. 

But the thought of leaving Nancy behind made him want to cry. And what if Steve didn’t want to go? He was an adult. He had options Jonathan just _didn’t_. 

None of this was fair. 

“Excuse me,” Jonathan said, standing up and leaving the table. He thought about retreating to his room, but that just seemed too close to everyone else. 

He left through the back door of the house and walked into the woods. After a dozen yards, he stopped. It was broad daylight, but these woods still gave him pause, even all this time later. 

He sat down on a fallen log and put his head into his hands. Tears flooded into his eyes and he didn’t try to stop them. He sat there and cried, not just because he didn’t want to go, but also because part of him _did_ want to go. To start over fresh someplace else was something Jonathan only dreamed about when he thought about going off to college.

Two sets of feet shuffled through the underbrush of the woods, and Jonathan barely had to look up to know who was coming. Neither Nancy nor Steve spoke. They simply sat on either side of Jonathan and put their arms around him. Nancy laid her head on his shoulder. Steve rubbed his back. 

Sniffling, Jonathan wiped at his face with his hands. “We’ll get through this, right?”

“Of course we will,” Nancy told him, and she sounded confident in that still-vulnerable way she had. “Of course.”

~*~

“Wow, that sucks,” Robin said, stealing another one of Steve’s fries. He’d picked her up at her parents’ house after that bombshell of a family meeting. He was taking Robin on a “date” so she could get her parents off her back about the “boys” subject. Really they just got take out burgers and fries and parked in the lot, eating in Steve’s car as they caught up. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Steve told her, taking a bite of his sandwich. “Before I moved in with Jonathan I didn’t really sleep. The thought of going back to that…”

“Was that, like, the beginning of the school year? When you weren’t sleeping?”

Narrowing his eyes at Robin, Steve said, “Yeah… why?”

She wiped her mouth with a napkin. “There was a rumor going around school that you were hooked on smack. Everyone said that’s why you looked like you were dying.”

Steve threw down the fries in his hand. “Shit, really?” 

Robin nodded. 

“Fuckin’ Tommy H.!” Steve swore, shaking his head in disbelief. “He just couldn’t handle it when I finally stood up to him, could he? What a dick!”

Robin smirked and then added, “When you came to school with a broken nose, everyone figured you’d pissed off your dealer.”

“We live in Hawkins, Robin!” Steve cried. “How the hell would I even _find_ a dealer?”

“The stoners seem to find ‘em alright.”

“That’s pot. It doesn’t count.”

“Says who?”

Steve rolled his eyes. “Can we get back to figuring out what I’m gonna do?”

“Well, what are the options?” Robin picked up her sandwich and took a big bite, chewing as she stared at him. 

“I–I suppose I could stay here. I’d have to find somewhere else to live.” Steve scratched his chin. “And another job.”

“You’re supposed to start at County next month, right?”

Steve nodded, pressing at the painful spot between his eyes. “Shit. I don’t think I have enough money for tuition _and_ an apartment.”

Robin hummed sympathetically. “I suppose you could ask them if you could put school off for a year.”

“You can do that?”

“I think so.” Robin shrugged and took another bite. She was still chewing as she explained, “My cousin took a gap year between high school and college. He tried to join a band.”

“Was he any good?”

She shook her head. “Nope.”

Steve sighed. This sucked so much. 

“What about moving with Jonathan? Can you do that?”

Steve had only given a few minutes thought to that idea. “I mean, I _think_ Joyce would let me come with them. I haven’t asked her, but it was implied.”

“Pros and Cons?”

“Huh?”

Robin sighed, looking up at the ceiling like she did whenever he frustrated her. “I _meant_ , what’s the good stuff and the bad stuff for each of the options?”

“Where should I start?”

“Moving with them.”

“Okay…” Steve thought about it, twisting a fry between his fingers as he did so. “I guess… I could probably get work there easier than here.”

“No burned down mall and all its ex-employees to contend with,” she said with a nod of agreement.

“And I’d get to keep sleeping in the same bed as Jonathan.”

“If you like that sort of thing.”

The unexpected comment made Steve laugh. “Yeah, I do.”

Giving Steve a sympathetic look, Robin asked, “Bad stuff?”

“Leaving Nancy here,” Steve told her. “I wouldn’t get to hang out with Dustin or with you, either.”

“That _definitely_ would suck. You know, for _you_.” Robin grinned, which made Steve laugh again. 

“Ha, ha. You’d miss me.”

Turning suddenly shy, Robin shrugged. “I might.”

Steve wanted to kick himself for bringing down the mood. Maybe if they just moved to the next thing?

“If I stay here, I’d get to hang out with you and Nancy, but I’d have to live by myself.” Steve had to hold back a shiver at the thought. 

“Mmm,” Robin said. “It’s too bad Jonathan isn’t older. If he was eighteen, he could just stay here with you.”

“Wait…” Steve finished chewing and swallowed. “His eighteenth birthday is just a few weeks away. Right after school starts. Nancy and I were gonna… We were gonna throw him a party.”

"He could decide to live with you, instead of with his mom." Robin shrugged and took a bite.

Shaking his head slowly, Steve said, "No. I don't think he'd go for it. His family is really important to him."

"And you're not?"

“I _am_ ,” Steve insisted, before suddenly losing his confidence. “I mean, I think I am.”

Her voice was soft when Robin said, “I bet you are.”

Steve gave her a smile and nodded. After all, it was Jonathan who made room for all Steve’s stuff so he could leave his parents house. It was Jonathan who found that ladder and used it almost every night to climb into Steve’s window at his parents house. He wasn’t the kind of guy who would do that for someone he didn’t care about, even if they were really good at sex, like Steve was.

“But–but what if I ask him to stay and he doesn’t?”

Robin shrugged. “Then at least you’ll know.”

Steve thought about this for a moment, and he supposed it was true. He wasn’t about to make a plan for getting his own apartment if Jonathan wasn’t on board. The only way to find out if he was on board was to ask him. 

That meant being brave and asking him. 

Steve could do that. He could be brave. 

~*~

El knocked on Will's door, afraid he might already be asleep. She couldn't tell from outside the room. Not anymore. 

But then he did open the door. "El?"

"Can I talk to you?"

"Sure," he said, making room for her to pass through the doorway. "Are you okay?"

"I don't know," she told him, taking a seat on his bed. "Do you really think Hop wanted us to move?"

Will shrugged, sitting down next to her with a sigh. "I don't think Mom would lie about that."

El thought about this for awhile. Joyce had always been nice to her. Always kind. When Hop died, Joyce acted like it was no question that El should live with them. Despite how hard it would be, what a burden she was to keep hidden and safe. Will was probably right. Joyce wouldn't lie. When Will looked over at her, El told him, "I don't want to leave Mike." She rubbed at her fingers nervously.

Will nodded. "It's going to be hard to leave, but maybe Mom's right. Maybe it'll be worth it."

"Going to school would be … nice," she told him.

He shrugged again, shifting back further onto the bed and resting back on his hands. "It can be. It's a good place to make friends." He looked down and pressed his lips together.

El couldn't quite place his worry, until she thought about the way those mean boys had treated Mike and Dustin. "Enemies?"

The edge of Will's mouth twitched. "Yeah, or enemies. School can come with those, too."

"Why go? If it's not safe?"

Will laughed a little, but it wasn't a mean laugh. It made El smile. "I mean, _mostly_ it's safe. Plus, it's the law that kids have to go to school. I don't know," he shrugged again. "I kind of like learning about stuff."

Thinking over the things she'd learned in the past two years, mostly by herself – so many new words, and how to read them better, and how to tell time, and what it meant to be a friend – El thought that going someplace just for learning sounded nice. "I like learning about stuff, too."

"We'll be okay," Will assured her, putting his arm around El. He was gentler than the other boys she knew, and El liked that about him. "We'll go to a new school, where nobody knows us. They won't think of me as Zombie Boy, and they won't think you're a Russian spy."

El laughed.

"Sure, we'll miss our friends, but maybe we'll make new ones."

"Yeah, maybe," she said, thinking about all the fun she'd had with Max over the summer. "That would be okay."

"See?" Will squeezed her again. "It'll be okay. I promise."

Promise. There was an important word. El grabbed onto that promise and held it tight.


	2. The Decision

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve makes a decision about whether to stay with Nancy or go with Jonathan, Nancy makes a plan, and goodbyes are always painful.

Jonathan picked up Nancy after work and brought her home with him the day after Joyce made her announcement. The ride was quieter than usual, and although Jonathan wanted to ask Nancy what she was thinking, he also didn't want to hear about how much she would miss him. Because he was going to miss her so much it felt like he might explode from the feeling. If Nancy felt the same way – he hoped she did, but maybe she didn't – hearing about it would just make Jonathan feel worse.

They made their way into the house silently, too. On the one hand, it was nice to be able to move around someone without having to talk about it, or think about it even. On the other hand, it felt a little like the time just before Lonnie left, when he and Joyce were just silent and tense. Jonathan hated that thought.

Once they were in his room, Jonathan caught Nancy and pulled her into a tight hug. She held onto him just as tightly, and when she tilted her head up to look at him, Jonathan felt desperate to kiss her. So he did.

Nancy kissed him back fiercely, and Jonathan thought maybe she felt it too. The desperation. The ticking clock closing in on them before he left. Jonathan ran his hands down her neck and over her shoulders and then down her sides. He found the bottom hem of her shirt and put his hands up under the fabric, desperate to stroke his fingers against her soft, soft skin.

"Jonathan," she whispered, pulling up on his shirt, trying to get it off him. He let her take it, hiding his face in the fabric for a moment so she wouldn't see the way his eyes teared up at the sound of his name on her lips.

Once the shirt was gone, Jonathan kissed Nancy again, pressing his tongue against hers, pulling at her lips with his. Nancy backed up toward the bed, and Jonathan followed. He helped her out of her shirt, and out of her pants all while undoing his pants and kicking them off. They made it onto the bed and under the sheets, somehow without breaking their kiss for more than a second at a time.

The slide of his skin against hers made Jonathan feel more than a little overwhelmed, even this long after the first time he'd touched her. He felt unsteady, unmoored, like he was falling, trembling. He held onto Nancy, as if that would help, as if she wasn't the source of his unsteady feeling, as if she wasn't the one making him come undone. Jonathan wanted her, he wanted to be inside her and watch the face she made when he moved for her, but then it would be over too soon, and Jonathan couldn't bear for it to be over.

Eventually, Nancy made the choice for him. She rolled Jonathan onto his back and covered his body with hers. She reached down and grasped his cock as she kissed him, angling him up and slipping him into her body. Jonathan groaned. His hips tilted up to meet her and his arms wound their way around her back. 

"I love you," Nancy murmured in his ear, making Jonathan choke back the urge to start crying again. 

He focused on kissing her, on matching her rhythm, on murmuring against her lips, "I love you, too."

The door opened, and they froze. Jonathan grabbed the edge of the sheet, pulling it up over Nancy, but when he curled up to look at the door, it was just Steve standing there. He smiled and closed the door behind him, locking it. "Hey, don't stop on my account."

Nancy laughed and kissed Jonathan again. 

With Steve in the room, sex didn't feel as intimate as it had the minute before, but it also didn't feel as fraught. Nancy sat up straighter, and though the difference in angle felt … _amazing_ … Jonathan didn't appreciate losing all that skin of hers against his. He followed her up, kissing her chest and her neck, holding her close as she moved.

The bed dipped, and Steve slid in behind Jonathan, pressing his bare chest and his hard on against Jonathan's back. He wrapped his arms over Jonathan's, and put his hands over Jonathan's wrists at Nancy's back. And, _oh_ , that was the missing element Jonathan had been craving. He sighed, leaning back against Steve, pulling Nancy with him to keep her close.

Nancy put her arms over Jonathan's shoulders, and likely over Steve's too, judging by how tightly she pressed against Jonathan's chest. Holding that close, she couldn't move much more than a slow roll of her hips. It wasn't much, but when Nancy's lips returned to Jonathan's and she kissed him again and again and again, slowly it became enough.

Jonathan's body ran away without him as he came, leaving him breathing heavily against Nancy's lips, and moving one of his arms lower on her back to keep her still so he could stay inside her for as long as possible before the sensation became overwhelming and painful. Nancy indulged him, holding her hips still, even as she framed his face in her hands and placed gentle kisses on his cheeks. Steve ran his hands up and down Jonathan's arms, kissing his shoulders and the back of his neck.

"Love you, Nance," he whispered, even as he had to put his hands under her butt and lift her off his too-sensitive cock. "Love you so much."

"Yes," she said, kissing him again. "Love you." She reached over Jonathan's shoulder, kissing Steve. "You too."

"Same," Steve said, and the tip of his cock was wet against Jonathan's back. 

Jonathan knew he should move out from between them, he should let Steve fuck Nancy until they were both satisfied, but he was feeling selfish. He wanted to stay there, between the two of them, as long as they would let him. 

Nancy was smart. She must have noticed his reluctance to let go, because when she took his right hand from behind her back, she didn't set it aside. Instead, she pushed it between them, down between her legs. "Jonathan," she breathed against his lips.

It was a difficult angle to work with, but she was sopping wet, dripping with his come. Jonathan hooked two of his fingers inside her, grinding the meat of his palm against her clit as he moved them in and out. Nancy’s breath hitched and she moaned softly. 

Jonathan used his other hand to brush her hair out of the way, kissing and then sucking on the side of her neck. Steve shifted at Jonathan’s back, reaching over Jonathan’s shoulder and kissing Nancy. She made small, accelerating noises against Steve’s lips until she came, pulsing around Jonathan’s fingers. 

“You guys are so beautiful,” Steve murmured, his hands on Jonathan’s back and shoulders even as he climbed out from behind him. He moved like he was going to get behind Nancy, but Jonathan was in a mood and stopped him. 

Looking up at Steve as he kneeled beside him, Jonathan took his wet hand from between Nancy’s legs and grasped Steve’s cock. After one good stroke that made Steve groan and roll his eyes up, Jonathan leaned in and licked the head of his dick, covering his tongue in the salty, bittersweet precome leaking out. 

Nancy shifted out of Jonathan’s lap and moved behind him, giving Jonathan room to get closer to Steve and suck him in as far as he could. “Holy fuck, babe,” Steve muttered, pushing his blunt nails back through Jonathan’s hair. 

Nancy hugged Jonathan from behind, taking Steve’s place keeping him grounded, loved, and safe. Working his hand and mouth together, Jonathan brought Steve to the edge and pulled him over it. 

Jonathan was able to swallow most of Steve’s come, but some of it ran down his chin. “Shit,” Steve said, sitting down all but in Jonathan’s lap. He grabbed Jonathan’s wrist when he tried to wipe off his chin, instead leaning toward Jonathan and licking him clean before kissing him. 

It was dirty and sticky, but also intimate and good. Jonathan loved it. He loved Steve. He didn’t want to go.

With a sigh, Jonathan got Nancy out from behind him so he could lay back on the pillows. Nancy laid down next to him, her head on his shoulder and her hand on his heart. Steve got himself settled on Jonathan’s other side, reaching across Jonathan to touch Nancy’s face, making her smile. 

“I had an idea,” Steve said, turning so he was laying on his stomach and propped up on his elbows, looking over at them. “Just, you know, a thought.”

“What is it?” Nancy asked him.

“What if we, like you and me,” he said, nudging Jonathan with his shoulder, “got an apartment here in Hawkins? I’d work and you could go to school. We could stay here. All together.”

“What about my mom?” Jonathan asked, the pain in his chest sharp and agonizing. 

“You’ll be eighteen the first week of school,” Steve said, like it was that easy. “You don’t have to move. You don’t.”

Jonathan smiled, but hot tears rolled down the sides of his face as soon as he blinked. He pulled Steve close, kissing his forehead and taking one shuddering breath after the next. 

“You don’t want to stay,” he said, sounding defeated. Jonathan wished Steve would look up so he could see his face. 

“I do,” Jonathan insisted, sitting up and turning to face the others. He wiped his face with his hands, probably making more of a mess than he was cleaning up. “I do want to stay. It’s just…”

Nancy sat up too, taking one of Jonathan’s hands and holding it. 

Jonathan sighed, shaking his head. “You guys didn’t know my mom during the year after Lonnie left. It was … _hard_ , you know? She took care of us, but only just barely. She didn’t take care of herself. She…” Jonathan shrugged. “If Hopper was still alive and he was going with her, I would stay,” he insisted, meeting Steve’s eyes for a long second before he caught Nancy’s. “No question.”

“But he died,” Nancy nodded, wiping her own tears away from her face. 

“So…” Steve sighed. “So you won’t stay.”

“Not _now_ ,” Jonathan insisted. “But I’m sure she’ll be back on her feet by next year.” He squeezed Nancy’s hand. “College? It’s not so far off, if you think about it.”

“We’ll make sure to end up in the same place,” Nancy said, sniffling. “It’s just a year, right? People have done it.”

“If you’re going…” Steve sat up, licking his lips and giving Nancy a pained look. “Nance, I-I can’t live by myself. I can’t. Not in this town. Not…” He sniffled, but if he had any tears, he managed to blink them away before they fell. 

Nancy nodded, and her tears hit the sheets below her with big plopping sounds. “You’re going with them.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “I mean, unless your dad gets real cool about me moving into your place, I have to go. I can help them. Look,” he said, moving closer to Nancy and giving her a crooked sort of smile. “The Byers? All _super_ pathetic.” Nancy laughed wetly, and Jonathan did too. “I think maybe they need me more than you do. And I…” Steve looked at Jonathan. “I–I need them too.”

“So what you’re saying,” Nancy raised her eyebrows and the corners of her mouth turned up. “Is that you’re punishing me for being self-sufficient?”

“Yes,” Steve replied, tapping the end of Nancy’s nose. “You got it, babe.”

Jonathan reached toward Nancy, pulling her over until he had both arms around her comfortably. “Just don’t forget about us, okay?”

“Yeah,” Steve said, pulling Nancy’s legs until she put them over his belly. “Don’t date anyone else.”

Nancy sighed, “So you two get to screw like rabbits and I’m stuck all alone?”

“Springfield’s only like…” Jonathan said, trying to remember the map he’d looked at earlier. “Four and a half hours away. We could meet somewhere in the middle on the weekends.”

“Every weekend?” Nancy asked. “I won’t be able to make that work.”

“As often as you can, though?” Steve leaned down, nibbling on one of Nancy’s knees. “We’ll take care of you.”

“Maybe that would be okay,” Nancy told them, holding Jonathan’s arms tighter around her. “You won’t meet another girl, will you?”

“What girl could we possibly love more than we love you?” Steve asked, looking up at her with his besotted face. Jonathan loved that expression on Steve’s face. It didn’t matter if it was pointed at Nancy or at him, it was beautiful just the same. 

Jonathan kissed the corner of Nancy’s jaw before pressing his nose to her hair and just smelling her. He had to get his fill now, while he still could. 

~*~

When Nancy got home, she ran into her mother before she could get to the bathroom to put a cool cloth on her face. Of course, Karen noticed and stopped her. 

“What is it? What happened? Did somebody hurt you?” she asked. 

That last question startled Nancy into stopping. She sat down on the stairs and wiped another tear away. “Jonathan’s family is moving away,” she admitted. “He’s leaving before school starts.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Karen said, sitting down on the step next to Nancy and putting her arm around Nancy’s shoulders. “I know it doesn’t feel that way, but everything’s going to be fine. I’m sure you’ll find someone new.”

“We’re not breaking up,” Nancy insisted, wondering why she was so surprised her mother would jump to that conclusion. Of course she would. She had no idea how deeply in love Nancy was, or with whom. “He’s moving to Illinois, not the moon.”

“Oh, I see.” Karen said, moving a little further away. 

Great. She probably thought Nancy was crazy. Not for the first time she wondered what her mother would do if she just _admitted_ everything. But she couldn’t do that. The fact that she was dating, and sleeping with, two boys was salacious, and unusual, but not dangerous. The fact that Jonathan and Steve were also sleeping with each other was a fact that could conceivably get someone killed. It wasn’t safe to tell her mother, so Nancy didn’t. 

“I’m going to bed,” she told Karen. “Thanks for listening.”

“Anytime, sweetie.”

Nancy got the feeling that her mother thought she was being naive. She probably figured Nancy and Jonathan would try and fail to keep up a long distance relationship. And then Nancy would move on. 

Well fuck that. 

Nancy didn’t survive monsters _three times_ to just give up when it came to a little adversity. No, like cutting her palm this separation was going to hurt like a son of a bitch, but it was necessary. A minor, if painful, complication. 

Jonathan was right. College wasn’t _that_ far away. If they could all end up in the same city, they could just pick up where they’d left off. 

But what city should it be? Nancy knew she wanted to major in investigative journalism. Steve wanted to do education. Jonathan… well, she figured he would probably want an art degree, focusing on photography. She’d ask him before he left if that was the case or not. 

Now, Jonathan and Steve probably wouldn’t be able to afford an elite private school without scholarships. Hell, even with scholarships, it might be tricky. In-state schools would be better than out of state. Except their in-state was going to be Illinois.

Chicago was in Illinois. 

It was a big city, full of schools. And actually, Northwestern was just outside the city. It had a famous journalism program. Nancy remembered seeing Tom’s diploma on the wall of his office when she first interviewed for the internship. It was too bad he’d died. He wouldn’t be able to give her a recommendation. 

Those from her teachers would have to do. 

Okay. This was starting to look like a plan. And Nancy loved having a plan. 

~*~

El knew she wasn’t supposed to be eavesdropping, but she also wasn’t sure how she was supposed to feel about leaving in the morning. Nancy told Steve and Jonathan about Chicago. El had been to the city. It wasn’t as nice as Nancy was making it sound. 

Still, they were sad about being apart, and yet happy or maybe even excited about the plans they made for when they were together again. There were a lot of “I love you”s, and then there were the sorts of happy noises that El _definitely_ wasn’t supposed to be listening to, so she left. 

Back in her curtained-off room, El thought about what it meant to be feeling several emotions at once. She felt really sad about leaving Mike. But also kind of excited about going somewhere new. And she felt like, when she got to see Mike again later on, she’d feel even more excited to see him because it would have been a long time since she last saw him. Like the year they’d spent apart.

She also felt afraid of going somewhere new, but apparently that was normal, too. The time El had gone to Chicago, she hadn’t been very afraid at all, at least not until Sister made her see Papa. Back then she’d had powers. Today she had…

She put her hand out toward the cloth curtain surrounding her room. It didn’t move at all. 

Today she had _nothing_ , just like every day for the last fifty-five days. 

Today she was still normal. 

Maybe it would last, but maybe it wouldn’t. El wasn’t sure which outcome she wanted more. 

Mixed feelings again. 

Normal. 

When El woke up in the morning, it was to the sound of a truck beeping as it backed up toward the house. It was late, wasn’t it? She’d never really gotten used to sleeping when the sun went down. It was never up or down in the lab. 

She got dressed in the “moving clothes” Joyce had laid out for her the night before, and put her pajamas in the suitcase labeled “JRH”. It still smelled a little like Hopper’s cologne. 

The sheets from her bed needed to get packed, and the curtain around her room taken down. Oh, and she supposed all the boxes and the table and chairs still in there had to go into the truck, too. 

When she stepped out of her room, Jonathan greeted her with a “Hey” and a hand squeezing her shoulder as he passed. The Byers all did that sort of thing. They touched a lot. El wasn’t used to being touched kindly at all until Mike found her in the woods. 

It wasn’t _bad_ , she thought. It was actually kind of nice. It just took some getting used to. 

Jonathan and Steve already had some of the furniture packed into the truck, while the others finished packing the boxes. El wasn’t sure where everything was supposed to get packed, so she just started finding boxes that were already taped shut and carrying them out to sit next to the truck. She found some that she couldn’t lift by herself, and that was frustrating. 

It had been years since _anything_ had been too heavy for her to lift. 

In some ways, when Mike and their other friends came over, the work got easier. If there was a box El couldn’t lift, usually one of the others could. And if they couldn’t, well it was fun for Mike and El to carry a box together, almost tripping over each other as they got Jonathan’s box full of books out of the house. 

Remembering the way Nancy and Jonathan and Steve had said, “I love you,” to each other the night before, and the way Mike had told Lucas that he loved El the day she spied on him, she came to a decision. She wasn’t going to leave without telling Mike she loved him too. It was too important to say for the first time over the phone. It had to be in person. 

El understood that telling a person you loved them was important. It wasn’t something to be taken lightly. But it was also something she’d never said to anyone before, even Hopper. It was harder to get out than she thought it was going to be, but she didn’t regret saying it. 

In fact, after she kissed Mike and left the room, she felt excited and immensely proud of herself. She’d done it. Without powers or tricks or anything, El had done it. And she could other things too, like moving away from Hawkins, and saying goodbye-for-now to Mike, and going to High School. 

Yeah, she could do it. 

~*~

Jonathan stood in his empty room with his arms wrapped around himself. So much of his life had happened here – good memories and bad ones, though Jonathan didn't know where the balance between the two fell. The bad ones had been so bad, and the good ones so good that they almost seemed like completely different entities altogether.

Footsteps approached from behind him and Jonathan recognized their cadence. Steve came into the room, looking around and sighing. "That's everything, huh?"

"Yeah," Jonathan said, reaching for him. Steve stepped close, putting his arms over both of Jonathan's shoulders in that way that felt safer and more encompassing than when he put his arms around Jonathan's waist. Jonathan buried his face in Steve's neck and pulled him as close as he could get. With a sad little chuckle, he said, "Seventeen years of my life, packed up in one day."

"Yeah, kind of a trip," Steve agreed, pressing a kiss to Jonathan's temple before just holding him there, silently standing.

A minute later, smaller arms wrapped around Jonathan's waist, and Nancy pressed her face against Jonathan's back. "What if I just," she said, her voice soft and thick with emotion, "don't let you go?"

"I think,"Jonathan said, turning and bringing Nancy in so he and Steve could both hold her, "the new owners might kick us out."

"You guys could stay in our basement," Nancy suggested, rubbing her face against Steve's arm.

Steve chuckled and kissed her hair. "Your dad would love that."

Shrugging, Nancy added, "We could hide you in a tent, like El." Jonathan watched as her face fell, like she knew it was a ridiculous plan and was grasping at straws, at any way of keeping them with her.

"Hey," he told her softly. "It's gonna be okay." He grasped her left hand and turned her palm up, running his thumb across her scar. "As a wise man once said," he paused, looking up at Steve, "we've got shared trauma."

A shaky smile on her lips, Nancy asked, "So what's a little more, right?"

Jonathan chuckled softly and Steve brushed Nancy's hair back behind her ear. Jonathan kissed Nancy's hand and nodded at her. "What's a little more?" He met Nancy's eyes, waiting for her to nod back before he put his hand on her cheek and pulled her into a soft kiss. He tried to tell her how much he loved her and how much he was going to miss her with that kiss. 

Beside them, Steve sniffled and rubbed Jonathan's back. As soon as Jonathan let himself pull back from Nancy, Steve pulled her in. As Jonathan watched them kiss, he kept his hands on both of them. He pushed in close, leaning his head on Nancy's shoulder and breathing her in, but holding tightly to Steve, using Steve's strength to bolster his own. 

They must have stood there almost ten minutes, just holding each other, breathing the same air for as long as they could. 

The spell was broken when Joyce knocked on the door, saying softly, "Hey, kids. Sorry, but it's time to go."

Jonathan nodded, but he let Steve be the first one to pull back. Still, Jonathan couldn't let go of Nancy. He held her hand, and Steve put his arm over her shoulders, and they walked together to the front door. Jonathan had to pass through the door first, so they would all fit, and he noticed El putting one last box in the truck. It was the one labeled "Hopper," and Jonathan found himself dropping Nancy's hand so he could help El with the box. 

While he was up there, Jonathan looked down at his family – those who were coming with them, and those who weren't – and wondered if he would have something this special ever again. Probably not. He wanted to savor it, but Steve reached up, pointing at the strap on the door. "C'mon, babe. We've gotta get Mom's car loaded onto the trailer."

Jonathan nodded and pulled down the door, jumping down next to Steve. Closing the latch felt like the severing of a limb. Once it was done, he leaned against Steve, just for a moment. Just to gain his bearings again.

They got the car loaded, and then that was it. "We're ready," Jonathan said, not feeling it in the least. He leaned against his car and watched as the others all shared hugs. Steve spent a long moment hugging Dustin, telling him something that made Dustin nod and wipe his eyes. 

Robin leaned against the car next to Jonathan, knocking her hip against Jonathan's and saying, "Hey. Be good to him, huh?"

"I will," Jonathan promised her. Watching Nancy hug El, Jonathan said to Robin, "I know Steve would appreciate it if you could keep an eye on Nancy. Make sure she's okay now and then."

Robin gave Jonathan a side-long look before asking, "Would you appreciate it, too?"

"Yeah," he told her with a decisive nod. "Yeah, I would."

"I can do that," Robin told him, pulling Jonathan into a hug that wasn't nearly as awkward as he imagined it would be. "Save a seat for me at Thanksgiving."

Jonathan nodded. "Sure."

Steve came over then, grabbing Robin into a big, growling hug that made her shriek and laugh. Nancy came to Jonathan, and the tears on her face made him break, too. He cupped her face in his hands and told her, "It'll be okay."

"I know," she nodded. "It'll hurt like hell in the meantime, but it'll be okay."

"Yeah."

Jonathan kissed her five or six times, telling himself it would be the last time after every one. And then it _was_ the last time and Jonathan had to force himself to get in the car. He looked over at Will, and knew they were both already missing the people they'd just said goodbye to. As he followed the moving truck down the driveway, Jonathan couldn't help but keep glancing at Nancy's image in the rear view mirror. Robin put her arms around Nancy, and then Steve pulled into the driveway behind Jonathan and he couldn't see Nancy anymore. 

It hurt like hell, and every mile away from Nancy felt like one he should double back on, but he didn't. Jonathan kept driving.


	3. The Move

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Byers siblings move into their new home and start at their new school.

The drive to Springfield was long, but Steve didn’t really have to think too much about the way. El rode up in the truck, helping Joyce navigate. Jonathan and Will followed after. And because there was no guarantee that Jonathan's rust bucket would make it, Steve brought up the rear, ready to bail them out if need be. 

There was some stuff packed in his car, but he honestly didn’t have that much stuff anymore. He had like three boxes, and then his clothes, and that was it. He’d left a lot of the stuff he used to own at his parents’ house. 

Maybe he’d send his parents a postcard with his new address on it in a few months. He hadn’t talked to them since graduation. He figured they knew where to find him all summer and hadn’t bothered trying to talk to him. Maybe they wouldn’t bother to try after he moved either. 

If that was the case, then that was the case. It was their loss, really. It wasn’t like Steve had any brothers or sisters for them to fall back on. If they wanted a kid in their life, they’d have to come crawling back to him. 

(Part of Steve’s mind wondered if they’d never really wanted a kid at all, and now that he’d left, they actually felt relieved.)

Steve had a new family now. When he had asked Joyce if it was okay that he wanted to move with them, she'd looked at him like he was silly for asking in the first place. Of course Steve was coming with them. Joyce wanted him with them so much, she didn't even stop to think he might have stayed behind. It was such a contrast to the way his own mother had just let him slip away without fighting for him that Steve knew he'd made the right decision in leaving.

So, he had a mom-type person in Joyce, and some little siblings in Will and El. He’d started referring to them as in-laws in his head, even though he knew that was stupid. He and Jonathan weren’t married. They couldn’t get married. But maybe Steve felt a little bit like they were. They’d been living together long enough, between the previous summer and this one, that Steve had sort of integrated himself into the Byers family rhythms and rituals. 

So maybe in-laws, but he decided to keep that part to himself for now. 

He followed the truck and Jonathan’s car off the interstate just after the Illinois border. They pulled into a truck stop, and Joyce got the moving van close to one of the pumps. Except, it wasn’t close enough to actually reach. Steve pulled his car into a spot and got out, locking it before jogging over and telling Joyce, “Hey! I’ll direct you, okay?”

“Thank you, Steve,” she said, and she looked exhausted already. 

After the truck was filled up, they filled up the cars and had an early dinner at the diner in the truck stop. Steve sat next to Jonathan, trying his best to be good and not grab Jonathan’s hand under the table like he really wanted to. 

A few more hours brought them to the outskirts of Springfield and the house that was theirs. Joyce had been here once, to look at the house before she signed the paperwork, but none of the others had.

It was a one story house, built sometime after the war, and now its old owners were retiring down to South Carolina, according to Joyce. It had four tiny bedrooms, a little kitchen, a moderately good-sized living room, and an unfinished basement. 

There wasn’t too much time to look around, as they wanted to get everything out of the truck and into the house for overnight. The evening passed in a blur of moving, and eventually Steve passed out in his and Jonathan’s room, their mattress just sitting on the floor in the middle of the empty room. 

Steve slept soundly for the first few hours, before dreams of driving away from fleshy monsters started to plague him. He woke up once to find the other side of the bed empty. Steve started to panic, sure that something bad had happened. 

But then he heard the toilet down the hall flush, and Jonathan came back into the room. Steve pulled Jonathan over onto him like a living blanket, but Jonathan just hummed, kissed Steve’s shoulder, and fell back asleep. 

Steve envied him. 

He knew Jonathan didn’t sleep well alone either, but he always seemed to have just a little bit easier of a time when it was just the two of them. Steve never slept all that well unless Nancy was around too. 

_ That  _ wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. 

Steve waited until the sun came up before he got out of bed. He felt restless and uneasy, like his mind was too much for his body to contain. He’d worn his sneakers the day before, so he put them back on and left the house. 

The neighborhood he jogged through was nice, in a really lower-middle-class suburban sort of way. He felt relieved that he probably wouldn’t run into anyone like his parents in a place like this. In fact, the only person he saw out this early was a lady walking her dog. 

She looked a little younger than Joyce, though there were a few strands of gray in her tightly curled black hair. Her dog was a friendly-looking lab, so Steve slowed down when he got close to them. Holding up a hand in greeting, he said, “Hey! I’m Steve. Can I pet your dog?”

“Sure,” the lady said with an indulgent smile. The dog was just as friendly as he looked, smiling when Steve scratched him behind the ears. “I don’t think I’ve seen you around before. I’m Grace.”

“Just moved in with my family,” he told her, pointing toward the other end of the subdivision-long street. “Down that way.”

“You’re in high school?”

Steve grinned at her, pushing his hair out of his face. “Just graduated, actually. I’m taking a year to work and help my mom settle in before I go to college.” It still felt weirdly okay to call Joyce his mom. 

“Oh, that’s nice.” She tugged on her dog’s leash. “Well, see you around, Steve! Welcome to the neighborhood!”

“Thanks!”

Steve jogged until his lungs hurt and the sun started to get hot above him. He found the house again, mostly by the truck still sitting in the driveway, and let himself in. 

Only after he got in the shower to rinse off did he realize that the all towels were still packed. Well, shit.

~*~

"You could wear something of mine," Steve offered, opening one of his boxes and pulling stuff out.

"Yeah, I don't know," Jonathan told him, pushing at Steve when he tried to hold up a light blue polo shirt in front of him. "I don't want to look like you."

Steve dropped the shirt onto their bed. "What's wrong with looking like me?"

"Nothing," Jonathan insisted, indulgently moving closer to Steve and squeezing his shoulder. "But I'm  _ not  _ you. I would feel silly."

Steve tilted his head in that way Jonathan knew meant the could see Jonathan's point. "But I mean, first day at a new school. Don't you want to make a good impression?"

"Not really."

Rolling his eyes, Steve groaned in frustration. "Come on. Making friends is not that hard."

"Not for you."

"Ugh." Steve went over to the closet and opened it, rummaging around in the clothes Jonathan had put away the day before.

"What are you looking for?" Jonathan asked him.

Steve grabbed one of the hangers and turned around, showing it to Jonathan. It held a collared, short-sleeved button-up shirt, and thankfully it was brown and not bright red or something. "Here," he said proudly, handing the shirt to Jonathan.

Curious, Jonathan asked, "Why this one?" He took it off the hangar and put it on.

"Because." Steve straightened the shirt and started doing up the buttons. "It matches your eyes. It's not too nerdy, but not out there either. And it's not some plain old t-shirt. Shows you make an effort."

"I have never once put this much thought into my clothes." Jonathan stood still as Steve finished doing all but the top two buttons.

"Yeah, I know," Steve told him with a smile and a cheeky wink. 

"I still say I don't need to make friends. I don't know why we're even bothering to talk about this."

Steve ignored him. "You sure you won't let me fix your hair?"

"Don't touch my hair," Jonathan warned him, holding up a finger as Steve picked up a comb from the dresser and took a step toward him. "No! Steve!"

"Just a little bit?" Steve pouted, and Jonathan couldn't keep the amused smile off his face.

"No!" he said, laughing when Steve made a feint toward him.

Then Steve tackled him onto the bed. "Ah ha! I've got you now, Byers!"

Jonathan blocked the comb with one hand and got his other into Steve's hair. As soon as Jonathan made a fist, pulling tight on some of his hair, Steve made a guttural noise and froze. "You're gonna have to try that on someone who doesn't know your weaknesses."

"Nngh,  _ fuck _ ," Steve said with a shudder. He turned his face away from Jonathan as best he could without making Jonathan's hold tug more. "Not fair."

"Drop the comb."

Steve shivered and did as Jonathan asked.

A little afraid he was taking the game too far, Jonathan asked in a quiet voice, "Do you want me to let go?"

"No," Steve told him with a little laugh, putting his hand on Jonathan's chest, "but you probably should."

"Yeah." Jonathan let go of Steve's hair, carding through it a few times with his fingers until it was more or less back in the right place. "I guess I should go to school. Get it over with."

"I've got to find some sort of job," Steve said with a groan. "Meet back here afterward to call Nancy?"

"Yes," Jonathan said with a smile, climbing out of bed and helping Steve to his feet. "One thing to look forward to, anyway.

"Two things," Steve insisted, giving Jonathan a deep kiss that left him panting and frustrated.

"Jerk." Jonathan picked up his backpack and gave Steve one last kiss. 

As he walked down the hallway, Jonathan called out, "Okay! We're leaving for school!" He knocked once against El's door, and a couple times against Will's across the hall from hers. "Let's go!"

~*~ 

El rode to school in the front seat, next to Jonathan. Nervous, she turned around to talk to Will. "They'll know."

"Know what?" Will asked, picking at his fingernails, but looking up to meet her eyes.

"That I don't know…" She struggled to find the words to encapsulate everything she was feeling. "...school. I don't know school. Not like I should."

"Just stick with me," Will assured her, reaching up to pat El on the shoulder. "You're smart. Really smart. You'll catch on quick."

"Yeah," Jonathan said. "And let me know if anyone gives you trouble."

Will rolled his eyes. "We don't need to go running to you with every little problem. We can figure stuff out on our own."

El kind of liked the fact that Jonathan was offering. She gave him a smile. It had been six weeks since she'd used her powers. Six weeks since Hopper died. She felt doubly vulnerable without either of them, and Jonathan's offer helped, even just a little bit.

The high school was big, and full of all sorts of people. El didn't want to go in, but at the same time she did. She wanted to learn. She wanted to be  _ normal _ .

Still, she let Jonathan and Will lead the way. People moved through the hallways around them, looking.  _ Staring _ . El stared back.

"Okay," Jonathan said, pointing down one of the long hallways. "I'm this way for my first class. You guys are down there. Stick together. I'll see you after school."

"Get lost," Will told his brother, but the mean words were said with a smile and a playful push. This was part of the thing they did as brothers.

El tried to understand, because now she had three brothers, and if she didn't treat them in the right way, people would  _ know _ . They'd find her and take her away again. She couldn't let that happen. "Yeah, get lost," she told Jonathan. "We'll be okay."

It must have worked, because Jonathan smiled. He smiled and he laughed and nodded. "Yeah, okay."

"Come on," Will told her, and as El walked through the crowded hallway full of other students, it scared her. There were just so many of them, in so many different colors. It was overwhelming.

El did the only thing she could think of, and grabbed Will's hand.

He looked over and asked, "Are you okay?"

"No," she told him, taking a deep breath, like she used to do to clear her mind before delving Inbetween. "But I want to go to class."

Will squeezed her hand, but then he let go. "It's right here."

Will walked into the classroom first, and El followed. It reminded her of walking into a room to find the demogorgon, the monster  _ she  _ set loose, about to kill her friends. It reminded her of pushing on her powers so hard that she'd flipped into the Upside Down.

Tugging her gently by the elbow, Will said, "Come on. There's some free desks over here."

All the kids in the class were looking at her, and she felt like she was failing at fitting in. They could already see how bad she was at pretending to be normal. They already knew.

The bell rang, and the rest of the people sat down. A kind-looking woman stood at the front of the classroom and said, "Hello, students." She took a paper out of her folder. "I am Mrs. Green and this is freshman geometry. When I call your name, please raise your hand."

El watched as "Ahlman, Casey" and "Brennan, Seth" raised their hands. Then the teacher called out, "Byers, Eleanor," and El realized it was her turn. She raised her hand. The teacher made a mark on her paper, then called, "Byers, William." Will put up his hand too.

Mrs. Green smiled at them. "Any relation?"

El didn't understand what she meant by that, but Will told her, "We're twins."

That was the story. That's what it said on El's new birth certificate. Eleanor Byers was her full name. Mrs. Byers was her mom. She and Will were born on the same day. It was a lie, but a good lie. The type of lie that kept people safe.

The teacher smiled. "How nice!" Then she called out for "Cooper, Nicole" and that was the end of it.

After finishing calling out names, Mrs. Green started talking about geometry. What she said didn't make much sense, but when she drew a triangle on the board and started talking about all its sides, El started to catch on. She saw the rest of the students writing things in their notebooks, so El did that too.

There was a book handed out near the end of class, and apparently it was hers, because she was supposed to pick it up and take it with her when the bell rang.

"Let's drop this stuff off in our lockers," Will said, leading the way through the crowded hallways again.

They stopped in front of a pair of lockers, and Will spun the dial on his, back and forth. It popped open. El stared at the locker next to his, the one that was supposed to be hers. It didn't pop open.

"Do you remember the number?" Will asked.

El shook her head. The number hadn't seemed important. Before, she just wanted things open and they opened.

They didn't open so easily anymore.

"Here," Will said, stepping back from his locker. "Put your stuff in mine. We'll figure it out later."

"Thank you," she told him.

He smiled and nodded. "You're welcome."

If this was what it meant to have a brother, maybe it wasn't so bad.

~*~

Jonathan sat at the edge of the cafeteria, on one end of an obviously under-used table. He took a sandwich out of his lunch and unwrapped it, taking a bite before digging back into his bag for his book.

He'd only just found it when a pair of girls sat down across from him. The one with dark hair, a black t-shirt, and dark purple lipstick said, "Hey, new kid."

The girl next to her was blonde, but her hair was cut shorter than Jonathan's and choppy. Her red shirt was torn at the collar, showing a black bra strap underneath. He wondered how badly they wanted people to think they were dangerous and cool.

"Hey," he said, more to be polite than anything else.

"What's your deal?" asked the blonde, playing with the long earring in her ear. "Where'd you come from?"

"Outside Indianapolis," he lied, taking another bite of his sandwich. Well, technically Hawkins  _ was  _ outside Indianapolis. More than an hour outside it. "Was there anything else?"

The dark-haired one looked at Jonathan for a moment before asking, "Favorite band? Go!"

Jonathan rolled his eyes, but he figured maybe Steve was right. He was probably going to need at least a few friends here. "Talking Heads."

The girls looked at each other and nodded. Blondie asked, "What's your name?"

"Jonathan. What's yours?"

"Jenna," she told him.

"I'm Kat," said the other, taking Jonathan's book out of his hands. Yeah, he already didn’t like her very much. "Did you get this from Lit class or something?"

"Or something," he told Kat. A few other students walked by, sort of ogling Jonathan or his table companions. He couldn't tell which. Maybe it was both. He started to wonder if having these friends was going to be more trouble than it was worth. He plucked the book back out of Kat's hand. "Thanks for stopping by."

Jenna huffed and stood up, but Kat smiled. She turned more fully toward Jonathan and asked, "You wanna go out sometime?"

Jonathan felt his ears go red. "S-sorry," he stammered, knowing he was making a fool out of himself. "I've got a girlfriend." Not to mention the boyfriend he was living with.

"Back in Indianapolis?"

"Yep."

"What's her name?"

"Nancy."

"Serious?" 

"Very."

Kat sighed. "That's too bad. The guys around here are  _ so  _ lame." She stood up, giving Jonathan one last smile. "Let me know if you and serious-Nancy ever break up. Long distance can be a bitch."

"Sure," he told her, more to get rid of her than out of any sense that he'd ever break up with Nancy. Even if, God forbid, Nancy ever  _ did  _ break up with  _ him _ , he'd still have Steve. If both of them were out of the picture, Jonathan figured he'd have more problems than lack of a date. It probably meant something went wrong again and somebody else died. 

He said a little prayer hoping no one else he knew would die.

Kat and Jenna left, back to a table with one other girl at it. Jonathan finished his lunch in peace.

~*~


	4. The Motel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> El struggles at school while Jonathan, Nancy, and Steve struggle to reconnect.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for this chapter: use of an ableist slur.

**_September 1985_ **

In the time between getting home from the school newspaper and the appointed time she was supposed to call Jonathan, Nancy tried to do her homework. She had a difficult time concentrating and the minutes inched by like hours. It had been two weeks since Jonathan and Steve left, and four days since she'd last talked to them.

Actually, four days since she'd talked to Jonathan. Six since she'd talked to Steve. He'd taken another job working mostly evenings, and since they were behind an hour in Illinois, his evenings ran _late_.

Nancy wasn't _too_ proud to admit that she missed them. Terribly. She felt vulnerable without them around, especially at night.

School wasn't the same without them either. She'd joined newspaper partially to get her foot further into the journalism world, but mostly because she knew she needed to fill her time. If she didn't keep busy, she'd have time to slow down.

She'd have time to miss them more.

Nancy spent the last five minutes before it was time just looking at the clock and waiting. 

Eventually, it was time. 

Nancy picked up the phone and punched in the number Jonathan had given her. The phone rang three agonizing times before it was answered.

"Hey, Nancy! Right on time. Very Nancy of you.”

Finding herself smiling, she replied, "Hi, Steve." The way she felt about talking to him on the phone now reminded her of sophomore year. Nervous and excited all at once. "How are the birthday celebrations going?"

" _Good_ ," he said, the tone in his voice implying something had already happened between him and Jonathan in the bedroom. Before the move she might have asked for details about this implied encounter.

Now, though?

Now she found herself not wanting to think about them so far away and without her.

"Can I talk to him?"

There was a commotion on the other end and Steve laughed before he responded to her. "What? O-oh, yeah. Sure. Jonathan! Phone!"

Nancy hadn't really noticed over the summer how _domestic_ Steve had become within the Byers household. Integrated there, like he belonged. Again, she felt as though she was missing out.

But was her pain at being excluded going to be worth it if being separated from them now allowed her to meet her goals later? She thought it might. Only time would tell.

"He'll be here in a minute," Steve told her. "So how's senior year so far? Weird to have your brother at the high school too?"

"No, actually," she replied, sighing. "Mostly it's weird that you and Jonathan _aren't_ there. I wasn't sure where to sit at lunch."

" _Please_ don't tell me you eat by yourself in the library," Steve said, making Nancy laugh.

"No. I've been sitting near Ally and Samantha. They're great. They're not _you_ , but they're great."

"Good." Steve made a kissing noise against the phone. "Love you. Miss you."

"You too," she insisted, hating the way the words did nothing to convey the sense of longing she felt.

"Here's Jonathan."

Before Nancy could say a proper goodbye, the phone changed hands. 

"Nancy!" Jonathan sounded almost as excited as she'd ever heard from him. She wanted to believe it was because of her phone call, but she had a suspicion it was because of the birthday festivities. "You called!"

"I said I would," she replied. "Happy Birthday, Jonathan."

"Thanks!"

"How's school there?"

Jonathan paused, murmured something – she was guessing to Steve – and then replied, "It's weird. Different."

"Yeah."

Why was this so hard? Nancy had spoken to Jonathan for literal hours in one sitting before. Why couldn't she manage a conversation now? Figuring it was her last-ditch hope to make some sort of satisfying connection, she said, "Well, tell me about these birthday festivities. About the same as last year?"

"Yeah," Jonathan said. "Except the cake isn't from the same box mix as before. It's a different brand."

"Still taste good?"

Jonathan laughed. "Yeah, I guess it does."

And that was that. Jonathan lived in a different town, with a different school and different brands in different stores. It was different, but just as good. It made Nancy worry that he'd find a different, but just as good, version of Nancy, too.

Then she snapped out of it. What other girl would love both Jonathan _and_ Steve the way she did? This separation was only for a year. That wasn't enough time to replace her. Not with the history the three of them shared. 

At least, she _hoped_ it wasn't.

~*~

“Okay,” said the teacher, Miss Grady, at the front of the room. “Who’s ready to summarize chapter three for us?”

El looked over and saw Will with his hand up. Some of the other students had their hands up, too. 

Instead of saying one of their names, the teacher looked at El and said, “Eleanor, what about you?”

The name Eleanor still bothered her, feeling like a spider crawling up her back, even though that's what everyone here knew her by. She insisted to the teacher, “It’s El.”

“Fine,” Miss Grady said, her tone sharp. “El. Can you summarize chapter three for us?”

El looked over at Will, but Miss Grady snapped, “Without help from your brother.”

Narrowing her eyes at Miss Grady, El asked, “Can I ask a question?”

Miss Grady sighed, but nodded. 

“What does ‘summarize’ mean?”

A few of the kids in the class laughed, making El’s cheeks heat up with embarrassment. She turned around and glared at them, desperately missing the ability to crush their stupid brains into mush. 

Miss Grady sighed again and said, “Just tell us what happened in the chapter.”

El opened her mouth and she tried to say something, but she wasn’t sure where to start and every second that passed was one where she wasn’t talking. 

“Did you read the chapter?”

El nodded. She’d read it as best she could. There were a lot of words she didn’t understand, even after using the dictionary she’d rescued from the cabin before the move. 

Crossing her arms, Miss Grady asked, “Okay, who’s the main character?”

El knew the answer. It was Pip, which was a small, easy word. Except everyone was looking at her, and the more she tried to get her tongue to cooperate, the more contrary it became. 

“P-p-p,” she stuttered, stopping when someone laughed. 

Scowling, El flipped to a new page of her notebook and wrote in big letters, “P-I-P.” She showed this to Miss Grady, so furious (half at the other kids in the class, half at herself) that she felt like she might start spitting fire at any second.

Miss Grady’s posture changed, and so did her emotions. Instead of feeling frustrated and annoyed, she felt bad for El. She felt sorry for her. Somehow that was worse.

“Okay,” she said gently, looking away from El to the other kids in the room. “Someone else, summarize chapter three for us.”

Will reached across the aisle, putting his hand on El’s arm. She could tell he was thinking encouragement in her direction. El gave him a little smile of thanks and patted his hand. 

On the way out of class, one of the taller boys knocked into El’s shoulder and said, “Good going, retard,” with a mean laugh.

Dropping her books, El tried to grab at him, crying, “Mouthbreather!”

Will held her back, stopping her from getting to him. “No,” he insisted, looking at the teacher in the corner of the classroom. “Not here. Just let it go.”

She started to ask why he wasn’t angry at them, but then she read him and realized that he _was_ angry. He was furious, but somehow he wasn’t showing it. “I don’t want to let it go.”

“Yeah, I get that,” he told her. “But we’re not being stupid about this. You fight back here and you’re going to get in trouble. Mom has enough to deal with. She doesn’t need you to get kicked out of school on top of everything else.”

El knew he was right, but that didn’t mean she liked it. She narrowed her eyes at him and gave a huff as she picked up her books and shoved them into her bag. She stomped out of the classroom, Will following after. 

“I’m going to check out that art club,” he said from behind her. “Mom’s not picking us up until after. Either you can come with me, or you can walk home.”

“What about Jonathan?” El asked him, before realizing Jonathan had told her he was heading to work right after school. "Oh."

Will caught up to her. “Just come to art club. The kids there are really nice.”

“Amber and Jenny?” El asked, remembering the conversation at lunch that day. It had been nice talking with people other than Will for once.

Will nodded. “Yeah. You like them. Come hang out with us.”

El didn’t know how to tell him that she couldn’t stand another minute in a room where she sucked at what everyone else was doing. It seemed like everyone else knew the right words to use all the time, and she just _didn’t_. Walking away from Will, she told him, “I’m going home.”

He didn’t try to change her mind, even when they were both at their lockers and El had to put all the work she'd been trying to do and just not quite getting done into her backpack. Still frustrated, she slammed her locker shut and left the school, ignoring Will’s shouted, “Goodbye!” behind her.

~*~

Jonathan leaned against the back of Steve's car, waiting. The car sat in the parking lot of a Burger King an hour west of Indianapolis, on the Indiana side of the state line. Steve was inside, buying a coffee, which Jonathan knew he was going to dump so much cream and sugar into that it would be undrinkable by anyone else. Still, it might be nice to hold for a moment to warm up his fingers.

It wasn't cold enough for snow yet, but fall was in full swing and the mornings were especially cold. Jonathan could see his breath and he played around at blowing fog from his lungs out of the lack of anything better to do.

That's when a familiar station wagon pulled into the lot. Jonathan grinned.

Nancy waved before parking next to Steve's car. By the time she climbed out of her seat, Jonathan had her in his arms.

"Hey!" Steve called out, walking across the parking lot toward them. "There she is!"

Jonathan let Steve have a turn hugging Nancy. He wanted to kiss her once Steve was done, but this lot was too public. There were too many people around.

"So what should we do?" Jonathan asked. "Where should we go?"

"I did some research," Nancy said with a little grin. "There's a motel not far from here. It's supposed to be nice enough. Check in's not until two, but they might let us in early."

Jonathan smiled. Of course she'd done research. "Lead the way," he told her.

He almost jumped in the car with Nancy, but figured that would be unfair to Steve. And they couldn't exactly all pile into one car, and leave the other one here to get towed. As much as he didn't want to be separated from Nancy for one more second, Jonathan held off. He got back in the Omni with Steve.

"Do you think," Steve asked once they pulled onto the highway behind Nancy and followed her, "that later on today we could like, each have some one-on-one Nancy time? Would that be cool with you?"

Jonathan thought about this. It had been awhile since he'd been alone with Nancy. It wasn't like it had happened all that frequently before the move, but Jonathan could see where Steve was coming from. He missed time alone with Nancy, too. Plus he'd had so much time alone with Steve lately, it did feel like there was a major imbalance there.

"Yeah," Jonathan told Steve. "That sounds like a great idea." He gave it another second of thought as Steve followed Nancy through a right hand turn. "How do we decide who gets to go first?"

Steve shrugged. "I don't know. Flip a coin?"

"Works for me." Staring at the back of Nancy's car as they followed her, Jonathan asked, "Did it look like she cut her hair?"

"Couldn't tell," Steve replied, giving Jonathan a look like he was crazy to have noticed such a detail. Jonathan didn't know how he _wouldn't_ notice. He thought about Nancy's hair and her face and her hands and her clothes and her body almost constantly, it seemed.

Jonathan knew Steve thought about stuff, a lot more than he let on. The problem was that he let on so little that Jonathan had no idea how wide that gap could be at any given time. Maybe it was narrower than he'd been assuming. 

They pulled into the parking lot, so Jonathan decided to just move forward from those thoughts. He told Steve, "Hey, go pay for the room, huh? It's not like we should all go into the office." 

"No," Steve agreed, pulling into a parking spot and killing the engine. "That would look strange, wouldn't it?" He shook his head and gave Jonathan a smile. "You know, sometimes I forget that this thing of ours is weird. It seems so normal now."

"Yeah," Jonathan agreed, tugging Steve's sleeve a little bit in lieu of kissing him.

Steve smiled back and got out of the car. Ten minutes later, Jonathan was closing the motel room door behind him and setting the security chain.

Nancy raised her eyebrows at him and Jonathan shrugged. "Don't want any interruptions."

She laughed and pulled him – finally! – into a kiss. She kissed Steve next and just like that Jonathan felt himself falling back into the old rhythm. 

"What do you want?" Jonathan asked Nancy.

She surprised him by responding, "Yes," and unbuckling his belt. Jonathan laughed, but he got undressed faster than he probably ever had before.

Then Jonathan helped Nancy get undressed, undoing the clasp on her bra while she kissed Steve. As he slipped it off her, Jonathan stepped closer, pressing his chest to her back and kissing her shoulder. Needing to keep some sort of contact with Steve, Jonathan cupped his elbow before running his hand up and down Steve’s arm. 

Nancy turned and kissed him. Jonathan had almost forgotten how the way she kissed was so different from the way Steve did. Not that one was better or worse, but they were different. _This_ was different. 

Jonathan held Nancy’s face as she kissed him, hoping it made her feel as precious to him as she was. He kissed her a few more times before mumbling against her lips, “Missed you so damn much.”

“Missed you too,” she insisted, walking Jonathan back toward the bed. 

He turned when they got there, throwing back the covers and giving Nancy an opportunity to kiss Steve some more. He felt a little jealous that he didn’t have Nancy’s full attention, and realized that Steve’s earlier idea was probably really important to actually go through with. He didn’t want to feel jealous of Steve. He wanted to feel like before, when seeing Steve and Nancy kiss just meant he was happy for them.

Jonathan tugged them both into bed with him, gladly accepting Nancy into his arms and kissing her. To his surprise, Steve climbed around to get behind Jonathan. He pressed his chest against Jonathan’s back, reaching over him to run a hand up and down Nancy’s side. 

Before Jonathan could break their kiss and ask Nancy what she wanted, _exactly_ , she pulled him on top of her. Laughing a little, Jonathan asked, “Really?”

Nancy made a frustrated noise before pulling at him with both arms and one leg. 

“Yeah, I think she’s serious,” Steve said, getting his hand in between them and caressing Nancy’s breast. 

Jonathan tilted his hips until he caught just right and pressed inside her. Nancy groaned, and she was so wet and open already that Jonathan thought he might have groaned too. Steve moved closer to them, putting his head close to Nancy’s and looking up at Jonathan. 

He wanted to ask what Steve was doing, but it was hard to speak when Nancy kept urging him with her hands and legs and voice to keep going, keep speeding up. Jonathan was so focused on Nancy and responding to her and making her feel good, that he only realized quite a bit later that Steve was talking. 

“...good, doesn’t it? I can’t get enough sometimes. What do you think we’ll do next year, when we’re together all the time again? You’ll share, right?” Steve said, taking a breath and kissing Nancy’s temple. “Love sharing with you, babe. Love to see Jonathan making you feel so good. Is he getting really hard? Like _really_ hard?”

 _Yeah, he is,_ Jonathan thought to himself, feeling a little self-conscious having Steve talk about him. When it was just the two of them he usually talked _to_ Jonathan, not _about_ him. 

Steve kept going, saying, “I love this part. I usually touch myself so I can come with him. Oh, that’s the best. Want me to touch you?”

Nancy bit her lip and nodded. 

Shit. Jonathan was barely holding on, but he wanted so badly to get Nancy through it before he came. He put more of his weight on his right arm, and put the left one up on the headboard. This made just a little bit of room for Steve to get his hand in between them. 

“Oh, shit,” Nancy groaned, throwing her head back. 

“That’s it,” Steve told her, his knuckles brushing Jonathan’s lower belly as he moved his hand. “See? We’ve got you, baby. Oh, he looks like he’s hitting all the right spots. Is that it? Are you getting close?”

“Yes,” Nancy said, rolling halfway toward Steve underneath Jonathan and grabbing his head so she could kiss him. 

Jonathan was just about to feel jealous again, even though he was the one fucking her, but then Nancy pulled him into a kiss, too. Her squeal against his lips turned into a shudder and she froze. Jonathan drew back, sharing a look with Steve. 

That look told Jonathan what he needed to do. He sped up, and so did Steve, and the noises they got out of Nancy were _not_ quiet. 

But Jonathan couldn’t take any more. He had to stop and close his eyes, buried deep as he came. Steve kissed him while he was coming, and Jonathan could swear that the feeling of Steve’s tongue against his made it last an extra second or two. 

Sliding off to the side, Jonathan used his left hand to guide Nancy into a gentle kiss. 

Jonathan heard Steve moving before seeing or feeling him. He pressed little kisses up Nancy’s arm and shoulder, making her look back at him and smile. He kissed her smile, then stretched over her to kiss Jonathan as well. Steve pressed kisses to Jonathan’s shoulder, then his arm, then his hip, getting up onto his knees. 

By the time Steve brought his lips back over to Nancy, Jonathan thought he could tell what Steve was after. Between kisses to her chest and stomach, Steve put himself between Nancy’s legs. She sighed, pushing her hands back through Steve’s hair as he put his chest down against the mattress and his face between Nancy’s legs. 

Jonathan watched as Steve made his tongue broad and flat for the first lick, giving a little flick up with the tip of his tongue when he reached the top. Nancy shivered. “Oh!”

“Is it too much?” Jonathan asked her, watching as Steve closed his eyes and went in for another lick. 

“Mm-mmm,” Nancy replied, shaking her head and intertwining her fingers with Jonathan’s. She bit her lips and sighed. 

Jonathan wondered if there was some way he could pay Steve back for practically insisting he go first. That’s when he realized he probably already was. Steve had a thing for the way his come tasted, and now he was all but drinking it from Nancy’s pussy. 

_What a freak_ , Jonathan thought, but that was _his_ freak. So far the good definitely outweighed the mildly puzzling (along with outweighing any of the few and far between things Jonathan didn’t like about Steve – like his reluctance to do dishes and laundry).

“Steve!” Nancy cried, pushing against the mattress with one heel, and then the other. “Ah! Oh, Jesus! Ah! Steve!”

She squeezed Jonathan’s hand and pressed her head against his shoulder, letting out a series of screams she stifled against his skin. 

Nancy was still trembling when Steve crawled up toward them, muttering anxiously, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, shit. Nancy, I… God, can I…?”

“C’mere,” she nodded, pulling Steve close. He ended up kind of half on top of Jonathan as he thrust into Nancy. 

Jonathan held onto Steve’s arm, steadying him as he moved for maybe ten or fifteen seconds before he swore, “Ah, shit,” and came. 

When Steve collapsed with a sigh, Jonathan took most of his weight so he wouldn’t crush Nancy. They laid together quietly, just sort of breathing for a minute or two. Eventually Nancy was the one to break the silence. 

She stretched, groaning, “Mm, I needed that.”

“Glad to be of service,” Steve told her, with a little snort of amusement. 

Realizing he still had Nancy’s hand in his own, Jonathan squeezed it again. “What if,” he said, moving Steve’s hair with his free hand so he could see Nancy, “we just keep you? Don’t let you go back?”

She smiled and squeezed his hand back. “I think my parents might come looking for me eventually.”

“We’ll go on the run,” Steve suggested, moving so he was on Nancy’s other side, bracketing her in against Jonathan. He put one arm across Nancy, resting it on her stomach, his fingers over her and Jonathan’s clasped hands. “Go live in a hippie commune or something.”

“Sure,” she said with a little laugh, rubbing her head against Jonathan’s shoulder. “And just live in a bubble where the real world doesn’t exist.”

“What if I want to bring my family along too?” Jonathan asked. 

“They can come,” Steve proclaimed, his eyes closed and his face smushed up against Nancy’s shoulder. “But no one else!”

Nancy made a tutting noise. “We can’t bring El and not Mike. That would be cruel.”

“Fine, Mike and the other kids we like can come. But no one else!”

“Not even Robin?” Jonathan smiled when Steve shot him a look. 

“Are there other lesbians at the hippie commune?” he asked. 

“All sorts of lesbians,” Nancy insisted. "She'll be very happy there."

"It's settled then," Steve said, closing his eyes again. "We're all running away together."

Nancy laughed, and Jonathan joined her. It sounded good. Amazing, even. Too bad it was just a nice dream. The real world would come calling them back soon enough, so Jonathan figured they might as well dream while they could. 

He pressed his forehead against Nancy's temple and tried to memorize everything about being beside her. After all, this visit had to last him all the way until the next one, and he didn't know yet how long that was going to be.


	5. The Fight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nancy and Robin go on an adventure, Steve breaks up a fight, and El rediscovers something she's good at.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for this chapter: use of an ableist slur.

Nancy sighed at her school work. She’d already finished all of it. Again.

It was only Wednesday, only three days since she’d driven away from Jonathan and Steve, and already she missed them. She’d missed them the most on Sunday night, when there was no one sleeping next to her. 

Between not sleeping very much and not having sex at _all_ , Nancy had a lot more free time than she was used to. It meant her homework got done early. Her articles for the school newspaper got done early. Her college applications were done. She’d rearranged her room and completely reorganized it. 

It still had only been six weeks since her boys had moved away. 

She was nervously sketching out a plan to convince her teachers to just give her the rest of the work for the whole school year so she could finish that early too, when Nancy heard the doorbell ring. She was far from the only person in the house, so Nancy didn’t bother to go answer it. 

She figured the real hold out for her homework plan was going to be Mr. Lawrence. Everyone knew he never recycled tests from previous years. This meant he came up with new ones every year. Unless he was also trying to escape the sort of loneliness that made Nancy’s bones feel filled with ice, Mr. Lawrence likely would not yet have written all the year’s tests. 

“Nancy!” her mother called up the stairs. “It’s for you!”

 _It’s for me_? Nancy tried to remember if she had made plans with anyone. Not that she could think of. The only people who would show up uninvited lived four hours away. 

Unless…

Nancy got up out of her chair and out into the hallway. As she galloped down the stairs, she realized that she’d made a mistake. It wasn’t Jonathan or Steve waiting for her at the door. It was Robin. 

“Hey,” she said, nodding a thanks to her mother before taking her place at the door. “What’s going on?”

“Get your stuff,” Robin said with a smile. “We’re going on an adventure.”

“An adventure?” Nancy asked, thinking Robin looked too relaxed for this adventure to be part of some sort of emergency. “What?”

Robin crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow at Nancy. “I have it on good authority that you’re in need of some fun. So, here I am.”

Nancy surmised, “Steve put you up to this.”

“Bingo. So are you getting your stuff, or what?”

Nancy thought about begging off, about telling Robin it was a school night and she really had so much to do. Then she thought about going back to her room and sitting alone for the next eight hours until she maybe got tired enough to pass out.

“I’m getting my stuff.”

After a quick goodbye to her mother, Nancy left the house. 

"So," Nancy asked, following Robin out to her car, "where are we going on this adventure?"

"Well, I found something," Robin said, getting into her seat and buckling in. She waited for Nancy to close her door before continuing. "I'm pretty sure it has to do with the shit that went down over the summer, and I could use a second opinion."

"This summer? Like the…?" Nancy struggled to find the words to describe everything that had happened.

"The Russians, in particular," Robin specified as they got underway. "A while back I started trying to fit their underground facility onto a map of Hawkins. It was kind of difficult, because when I was down there, I didn't really think about measuring distances."

Intrigued, Nancy asked, "Did you end up making any progress?" Suddenly she was pleased that she'd decided to leave the house that night.

Robin nodded, turning out of Nancy neighborhood toward Jonathan's old one. "I had Steve remind me how his mom – sorry, how _Mrs. Byers_ – found that Russian scientist."

"Alexei," Nancy remembered. "They found him monitoring some equipment under some old farm house."

"Yeah." Robin's eyes lit up and Nancy couldn't help but smile in return. "It turns out three other houses in that area were sold in the same two month span to the same company."

"Starcourt?" Nancy asked.

Shrugging, Robin said, "Well, the company they made to hide their association with Starcourt, but yeah."

"And you checked out those houses?"

"I did."

Breathlessly excited for the answer, Nancy asked, "So what did you find?"

"I found a secret door," Robin told her. "But I didn't want to go through it alone."

"Probably a smart idea," Nancy said, pretty sure she wouldn't have had such restraint if it had been her. Of course, for the last two years, she'd always had Jonathan there with her whenever she wanted to check something out. 

Not having him here now felt more than a little wrong. Still, it was an investigation, not a date or something. Nancy wasn't cheating on him. 

It didn't take long before Robin pulled into a long driveway just a quarter of a mile or so from Jonathan's old house.

"I can't believe they were digging and building all of this underneath us this whole time," Nancy said taking the flashlight Robin handed her and turning it on to make sure it worked. The sun was starting to set, and even though she knew it was silly, she eyed the forest around them warily. 

Robin nodded toward the dark house. "Come on."

Nancy followed, saying, "I kind of wish I would have brought my gun."

"You have a gun?" Robin asked in a harsh whisper as they approached the porch of the house.

"Technically Jonathan and I stole it from his dad," Nancy told her. "But yeah. I have it hidden in my bedroom."

Robin gave her a long look before chuckling and shaking her head.

"What?" Nancy asked. 

"Nothing," Robin insisted, going to the front door of the house and turning the knob. The door clicked open easily. "You just put out a very different vibe at school."

"School is school," Nancy said, shrugging as she realized her explanation probably wasn't very effective. She followed Robin into the house. "Everyone finds a role they kind of fit into and then gets stuck there. After Barb died, no one besides Jonathan and Steve wanted me to be any different than I was before." She winced as she stepped on a creaky floorboards. "It was easier just to pretend I was the same old Nancy."

"Yeah, I get that," Robin said, leading the way through a dark kitchen and opening a door that led to steps heading downward. "My parents still think I'm just waiting to meet the right boy." She gave a sarcastic laugh and headed down the stairs.

The cellar at the bottom of the stairs was starkly bare -- and not nearly as dusty as Nancy would have expected.

"So, where's this secret door?" Nancy asked, shining her flashlight around. "This place looks pretty empty."

Robin shone her flashlight at one of the walls. "This basement isn't as big as the house above it," she said, walking from the staircase over to the wall. "It should be, though. There's basement windows on all four sides when I went around the outside of this place. But do you see any windows on this wall?"

"No," Nancy said, using her own flashlight to make sure. "It's a false wall."

Robin said, "Yeah. I think that's why the Feds must have missed _this_." She pressed against the wall and a whole door unlatched and slowly swung outward.

"Where does it go?" Nancy joined Robin at the door, peering through it at a set of stairs headed downward.

"I haven't checked yet. I want to make sure we can open it from the other side. Just in case it closes," Robin said, her grin more excited and less afraid than Nancy would have expected. "You stay here. If I don't open the door within a minute, let me out. Okay?"

"Yeah, okay," Nancy agreed, watching as Robin looked around inside the stairwell.

"I think I see it," she said, reaching for the door. "Here goes nothing."

She closed the door, leaving Nancy alone in the basement. Shit, she really wished she would have brought her gun.

The door clicked open and Robin appeared, grinning. "There's a handle," she said, pointing. "I'm pretty sure it says, 'Pull to exit,' in Russian."

"Handy." Nancy stepped into the stairwell and shone her flashlight down it. "Jesus, how far do they go?"

"The elevator at Starcourt had to be at least twenty stories down." Robin followed as Nancy led the way down the stairs.

"They probably stopped when they hit bedrock," Nancy guessed. "The mall is kind of on high ground. We're closer to the river here. Further down in elevation."

"So hopefully not as far!" Robin grinned and Nancy found herself grinning as well. Adventure called.

It ended up being five flights of stairs before they reached the bottom. Nancy pressed her ear to the door they found there,listening to hear if anything was happening on the other side. Robin joined her.

"I don't hear anything," Nancy whispered. 

Robin pointed past Nancy. "Hey, look. Pull to exit." She pulled the handle and the door released, swinging away from them, into a dark space beyond. 

Nancy and Robin both shone their flashlights into the space. It was industrial looking, full of a lot of concrete and metal surfaces. Just how Nancy imagined a communist government-funded facility would look.

Robin stepped farther into the room, shining her flashlight first one way, and then they other before saying, "Holy shit. I was right! This is it."

"It?" Nancy asked, following Robin. She found herself in an open space with a ceiling at least two stories high. Halfway up there was some sort of machine with a walkway around it, and behind that was a glassed-in room. "This is the machine?"

"What's left of it, yeah," Robin said, climbing the stairs to the walkway, presumably to get a better look. 

Glancing back, Nancy realized that the door they'd come through was disguised to look like the rest of the concrete wall around it. The only thing marking the place was an inconspicuous yellow triangle in the markings on the floor.

"This is how all those Russian spies and soldiers and everything escaped," Nancy realized. "Maybe there are more doors like this one."

"What?" Robin asked from above her as Nancy searched the floor for more yellow triangles. 

When she found another, it was actually more of a blue-green color. Still, it didn't quite seem to match the spartan decoration on the rest of the floor. She pressed against the wall. It opened.

"I found another one!"

"No shit," Robin said, looking over the railing at her before scrambling down the stairs. She looked over at the yellow triangle door, then back to the green one.

"This is too close," she said, looking again. "The house above here still belongs to the same people who bought it fifteen years ago."

Nancy wondered just how much time Robin had spent on figuring out this puzzle. "Maybe there's another tunnel. Like at Starcourt," Nancy suggested, sticking her head and flashlight through the door to look.

"Yeah, maybe." Robin looked through as well, and laughed. "Is this more fun than sitting at home by yourself, or what?"

Nancy laughed, too. "Definitely more fun." She checked for the "Pull to exit" handle, and when she saw it there, she stepped into the corridor beyond the secret door. "Let's figure out where this goes!"

~*~

**_November 1985_ **

Steve clocked in, but mornings were always a little slow, so after checking on his one table he took out his notebook and stared at the essay he'd been working on all week. He thought he might have been getting somewhere, but then another customer walked through the door. He seated her at a table and took her order, putting it into the kitchen before going back to his essay. 

Fuck, why _was_ he trying to show a similarity between the way he felt for Jonathan and Nancy and his supposed love of learning? Since he couldn't spell out his feelings about them directly, it made it sound like he was turned on by books. That wasn't going to cut it. Why hadn’t he bothered to save copies of the essays he did last year? This was so dumb, having to do it again.

Maybe if he came at it from a different angle?

"What are you working on?" asked Martha, one of the other servers at Big Dan’s. She peered at him over the lunch counter, flipping her reading glasses up onto her head. 

“My essay,” he said. When he looked up, he realized that he’d confused her. He’d been doing that a lot lately, having gotten too used to spending all his time with Jonathan. It had become easy to pick up conversations in the middle, without much, or even any, context. “Sorry, my essay for this one college application.”

“Leaving for college? But you just got here!” she cried, smirking to show she was teasing. “What do you want to study?”

“I’m not a hundred percent sure,” he told her, watching the first of his plates for Table Three come up in the window. “Right now I’m thinking education. Like being a teacher.”

“Huh,” she said, which did not instill Steve with a lot of confidence. He stuck his notebook in the pocket of his apron and ran the food out to Table Three. He checked in on his only other table before ending up back at the lunch counter. 

What could he talk about in his essay? What sort of life experience did he think prepared him to do well in his chosen field? He’d only done a few things so far. Play basketball, graduate high school, fall in love, oh, and survive living in a town that regularly regurgitated monsters from an alternate dimension. 

Well, actually…

Maybe he could write it about the time he led a group of thirteen year old dipshits on a mission to help save the world. Obviously he’d have to change some of the details, but that could work. Right?

But what could he write in place of the creepy tunnels full of alien spores, killer vines, and toxic fumes? Camping? There was navigation involved. And building a fire. It sounded way less cool as a camping story. Maybe the demo dogs could be a pack of wolves? Nah, that was pushing it. A singular mountain lion _maybe_. That might be believable. 

Steve had just finished ringing out table three when Martha tapped him on the shoulder. “Phone for you.”

Huh. That was weird. Steve hoped everything was okay at home. He picked up the phone and said, “Hello?”

“Steve! Hi!” He was pretty sure he recognized that voice. 

“Dustin?”

“Yep, it’s me.”

“That’s so crazy! I was just thinking about that thing we did with the dogs and the school bus at the junkyard and the tunnels!”

Dustin paused for a moment before asking, “Why?”’

“No reason,” Steve lied, not wanting to go into the intricacies of college application essay writing on the phone. “What’s up? Why are you calling me at work? On a school day? How did you even get this number?”

“El gave it to me yesterday. I told her it was for emergencies.” Dustin said, and yep. That explained it. As powerful as that girl was – or at least used to be – she had a few things to learn about not being so gullible. Of course, given her life so far, Steve could excuse her for thinking emergencies were more common than they actually were anywhere besides Hawkins.

“Make it quick, Dustin.”

“Right!” He stammered a few times before eventually asking, “Wh–what should I get Suzie for Christmas?”

" _This_ is not an emergency! Christmas is still almost two months away! I don’t know!”

“What are you getting Nancy?”

Steve scoffed. “Okay, first of all, Nancy isn’t a radio tower nerd like Suzie, she’s–“

“A newspaper nerd, I know,” Dustin broke in. Goddamn it, was he _right_? “But I want to get Suzie a romantic gift, and you’re the most romantic guy I know!”

“I’d take that as a compliment, but I know how small your social circle is.” 

“Steve!”

“Dustin!”

“Come on! One little hint?”

Steve sighed, and noticed Martha motioning for him to wrap it up. He also noticed his notebook with its unfinished essay. Taking a leap, Steve said, “I don’t know. Make her something that means something to the two of you. From that dog dragon movie or camp know nothing or whatever.”

“Camp Know Where,” Dustin corrected him. “But you just gave me the best idea! Thanks!”

“Anytime, Dusty-bun!” Steve made fake smooching noises into the phone until Dustin hung up on him. 

“Who was _that_?” Martha asked as she brought some dirty dishes to the washtub behind the lunch counter. 

Steve always had trouble explaining the fact that he was friends with younger kids. So he just lied and said, “My little brother.”

“Ah,” Martha said with a smile. “I know a thing or two about those!”

Steve got the impression that she was trying to start a conversation about family, and honestly, he just wasn’t up for it. Between finding a job, learning how to do that job, and stressing out over this essay, he hadn’t taken the time to figure out how to explain his reasons for moving. He couldn’t exactly tell people he’d let his boyfriend’s family all but adopt him even though he was technically an adult. 

So Steve gave Martha a quick, “Hey, that’s cool,” before saying, “I should really check on my tables,” and getting the hell out of there.

It was one of Steve’s early shifts at Big Dan’s, which meant that as soon as the dinner-shift servers started coming in, Steve was free to go. He drove home, hoping Nancy would be at her house when he called, so he could ask her about his new essay ideas. He did not expect to turn into the neighborhood and find some kids fighting in the middle of the road. 

He _really_ didn’t expect to recognize the girl who jumped on the biggest kid’s back and put him into a death-grip of a sleeper hold. _Shit_.

Steve put his car into park and turned off the engine before he got out, calling, “Hey! Break it up!”

One of the little bastards listened to him and bolted, but the other two stayed, one pulling on El’s leg as the second yelled, “Get the retard off him!”

“Who the fuck are you calling retard, dipshit?” Steve asked, pushing the kid who spoke before pulling his friend away from El. “Get lost!”

The big kid fell to his knees, but El held on. 

Dipshit #1 looked at Steve warily, but tried his luck, saying, “She’s gonna kill him!”

“El, sweetie?” Steve said, moving around the fight until he could see her face. “Did these dumbasses hurt you?”

She glared up at him and nodded. The big kid was starting to look a little red. He reached out to Steve.

Steve shrugged at him. “Sorry, boys. Sounds like getting killed is your own damn fault. Guess you should think twice before putting hands on someone else.”

Dipshit #2 went for El again, grabbing at her hair. “Let go!”

Steve punched him in the nose. “Don’t touch my sister, asshole.”

“Oh, shit,” said Dipshit #1, pulling his friend away as blood started sleeping down his face. “Please! C’mon, we’re sorry. Please get her to let go!”

The big kid fell onto his hands, then onto the ground. El still hung on. It was impressive, really.

Shit, she might actually kill him. 

Steve crouched down next to them. “El? You can probably let go now.”

She sneered at him, but she loosened her hold, scrambling up onto her feet and facing the others. She put Steve directly behind her left shoulder, making Steve realize that she trusted him. A lot. 

He didn’t take that for granted, at all. Even after three months of living together, it seemed like an accomplishment he'd somehow done without noticing.

The boy on the ground coughed and turned over, just sort of lying in the street, looking dazed but at least semi-conscious. His friends warily hauled him to his feet, keeping their eyes on El as they led him over to where they had left their bikes beside the road. 

El had a bike – Jonathan had bought it for her used – but Steve had yet to see her successfully ride it. She must have been walking home. He said, “Hey, get in. I’ll give you a ride the rest of the way.”

“Okay,” she said, but she stood still, watching the boys leave. One of them got on his bike and started riding, only to suddenly fall a few yards later. It looked almost like something had pulled his bike out from underneath him. 

Something invisible, like… 

Looking down at El, Steve said, “Holy shit. Did you do that?”

“I–I didn’t _mean_ to,” she replied, and Steve watched as a trickle of blood fell from her left nostril. She quickly wiped it away.

“Hey!” Steve put his hand out for a high-five. “They’re back! You’re back!”

A smile crept onto her face slowly, and then she was beaming. She hit his hand (harder than necessary, _wow_ ) and giggled. 

“C’mon,” he said, tilting his head back toward his car. “Let’s go home.”

A smile still on her face, El nodded. She grabbed her backpack from the side of the road and got in the passenger seat. Steve started the car and drove, pausing for a second when he came to their turn. The boys had gone straight, all of them walking their bikes like they were now afraid of falling off. 

“They think I’m stupid,” she said, narrowing her eyes at them. 

Steve turned the corner. “You’re not stupid,” he assured her. 

She opened her bag and pulled out a piece of paper. It had a big red “D” written at the top. She held it out like it was proof and insisted, “Stupid.”

“You know what?” Steve said, kinda wishing he _had_ let her choke that kid to death. “You passed. You spent most of your life not in school, and you still passed. I bet none of those assholes who called you stupid could have done the same. Okay?”

“I... _passed_?” she asked, looking back at the paper.

“Yeah.” Steve pulled the car into the driveway and shut off the engine. “Do you know how many Ds or even Fs I’ve gotten on tests over the years?

El shook her head. 

“A bunch,” he assured her. “And I might not be the smartest person, like Nancy, but I’m not dumb either.”

“Will says you can be a dumb-ass,” she told him, with a mischievous smile.

Steve laughed. “Yeah, I suppose so. Sometimes. Especially when I was actively _trying_ to do shitty in school just to make my parents mad.” He shook his head. “Look, sometimes shit happens and you make some mistakes. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person or someone who deserves to get teased or hurt. Okay?”

Nodding, El said, “Okay.”

“And hey, just let me know and I can help you with school,” Steve told her as they pulled up to the house. 

“Will tries to help me,” she insisted, and it seemed to Steve like she was saying if Will couldn’t help her, no one could.

Turning off the engine, Steve said, “Yeah, but Will is freaky-smart. He gets things the first time they’re explained to him. He doesn’t understand how to get you from where you are to where you need to be.”

El gave Steve a long, assessing look. “But you do?”

“I can give it a shot, anyway.”

“Okay." El smiled and gave Steve a short nod.

They got out of the car and as they walked to the front door, Steve told her, “Maybe next time you get in a fight, don’t almost kill someone, huh?”

“I was very mad,” she said, sighing. “But you’re right. No killing.”

“Cool.”

Steve let El use her key on the front door (she seemed to get a kick out of using it), and followed her inside. They were the first ones home. Joyce and Jonathan were both working. Steve thought Will had that art club thing he was going to check out. 

He told El, “Hey, I’m gonna call Nancy. Want me to let you know if Mike can come to the phone later?”

“Yeah,” she said with a vigorous nod and an excited smile. 

“Cool.” He headed for his room to change out of his greasy work clothes when something occurred to him. “Hey, where did you learn how to choke someone like that?”

“Hopper,” she said, before disappearing into her own room. Steve wasn’t sure if she meant Hopper had taught her, or she’d seen him do it. He hoped it was the former. 

~*~

El couldn’t believe what had just happened. Her powers had come back. Or, at least one of them had. She still needed to find out if she could do all the other things she used to be able to do – the things she used to be _good_ at.

She closed her door, took a dark bandanna out of her dresser, and turned her little radio between stations so it made static. Sitting on the floor with nothing to see and nothing to hear, she let her mind float away. She went to the dark place she liked to call Inbetween. It felt a little like going home, and she had to take a deep breath to calm her emotions before she could really test out her abilities.

Her first target was close – Steve. He was on the phone, talking to someone. Talking to _Nancy_.

Finding Steve wasn't a stretch. He was maybe twenty feet away. Easy.

Her next target should be farther. Joyce. El let her mind float through the Inbetween until she locked onto Joyce's familiar presence. She was in her car, listening to the radio and driving. Joyce wiped a tear from her face. 

El could _feel_ how sad Joyce was, and most of that sadness had one source: Hopper. Joyce missed him. 

So did El. 

She missed him so much. Just thinking about him hard enough made El start to think she could feel him too. The feeling came from far away.

It was probably an old feeling, she thought. Just leftover memories of the people who loved him.

Except…

Except as El followed that Hopper-feeling, it got stronger and stronger. It felt like it had a specific source. An alive-feeling source.

El hurtled herself toward that source. Pushing toward it was _hard_ and it _hurt_ , but she kept going.

She found Hopper.

He looked sick. Starved maybe, by how loose his clothes looked on him and the strange shape of his face. El remembered being starved when she wouldn't do what Papa asked of her. It made her wonder what Hopper wouldn't do for the people holding him here.

Looking closer, she saw that his hair was shaggy and his beard was grown out. Time had passed for him, too. It seemed odd that it would, but it also seemed odd to find him alive. He sat against a wall, on a dirty floor, staring straight through her. She went to him, kneeling down on the floor beside him. El knew he was too far, that he would turn to smoke if she tried to touch him, but _oh_. She wanted to place her head on his shoulder and wrap her arms around him _so badly._

She looked at him and she cried. "Dad?"

He raised his head and El held her breath. Had he heard her?

"Dad!" She tried again, but his eyes followed someone else. 

El had to push even harder to be able to see the other person. It was a soldier of some kind, but El had never seen a uniform like the one he wore. 

She tried to see more, but a sharp pain flared through her head. Everything went dark, despite how hard she tried to get it back. "Dad!"

"El?"

She could barely hear the voice past the stuffed-full rushing sound in her ears. 

"El, are you okay?"

She opened her eyes, squinting at the light in them. It was just her room, and the light was the one in her ceiling. El didn't remember lying down like this. She didn't remember taking off the blindfold, either.

Will was looking down at her, his eyebrows doing that worried thing. "Your nose is bleeding," he said.

El pushed at the space under her nose and her fingers came back red.

"Does that mean what I think it means?" Will's voice sounded more excited than it had in months. 

"Yeah," she told him, letting him help her up so she was sitting again. A sharp pain in her head made her wince. "I pushed too hard."

"But your powers are back?"

El nodded. She couldn't stop herself from saying the next sentence out loud, even if she'd wanted to. "I saw Hopper."

Will leaned back, sitting on his feet. "What do you mean you saw Hopper?" He looked a lot more like he was confused than like he didn't believe her.

"I think…" El smiled at Will. "I think he's alive."

Will blinked a bunch of times, looking around the room. "But, how _could_ he be?"

"I don't know."

"Where is he?"

"Prisoner," she told Will, sure that wasn't quite the right word, but not remembering how to make it right. "I couldn't find out where. My head…" She winced again.

"Okay," Will said, licking his lips. "Okay, you need to take it easy. If we're going to find him, you can't burn out again."

El wanted to find Hopper so bad she thought she might _explode_ from the feeling. But Will was right. She was still healing. She didn't want to lose her powers forever.

She didn't want to split her own skull and die before finding Hopper.

Looking at Will, El told him, "Rest now. Look again later."

He nodded decisively. Then he got the worried look back again.

"Don't tell Mom," he said.

"About my powers?" Why shouldn't she let Joyce know? She could maybe help. She knew how to call that lab doctor, the nice one who helped Joyce adopt her.

Shaking his head, Will told El, "No. About Hopper. I don't think we should tell her until you have a location. If we can't find him, it would just make her more sad."

El supposed she could see his point. She nodded. "Okay."

"And--and…" Will got a look not unlike the one Joyce put on when she was trying to be stern with any of her kids. "Don't try again without me. I don't want to find you like this again. It's…" He sighed. "Scary."

"I won't," she said, giving Will a slight smile. "Promise."


	6. The Recording

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Steve has a sleepwalking episode and El decides that it's time to find her dad.

Steve had to dodge a big cardboard turkey to get into Big Dan's a week before Thanksgiving, when Nancy, Robin, and the others were planning on driving all the way to Springfield for the holiday. 

Steve might have been counting the days already.

As he took off his hat and coat, pushing his hand into his hair to shake out the effects of wearing the hat, Steve waved to Manny in the kitchen and nodded to Martha behind the lunch counter. "Hey! What's with all the Thanksgiving decorations all of a sudden?"

"Big Dan loves the holidays," she told him, filling up a soda and placing it on her tray. "I think Thanksgiving is probably his favorite."

"Not Christmas?" Steve asked, tying on his apron and finding a booklet of blank order slips and pen from their spot under the register. When he looked up, he saw an unfamiliar face carrying a tray past the counter area and into the kitchen. Steve put a hand on Martha's arm and asked, pointing through the window to the kitchen, "Who was that?"

The stranger came back out of the kitchen and stopped short when he saw both Steve and Martha looking at him. He was blonde and skinny, about Jonathan's height, and Steve couldn't decide if he looked like he was twelve or twenty-five.

Martha gestured to the kid, saying, "Steve, this is Brad. Brad, Steve. Now you've met." She lifted her tray and left Steve standing there with Brad.

"Hey," Steve said, deciding it didn't hurt to be friendly. He stuck out his hand for Brad to shake. "Either we've been working opposite shifts since I started two months ago, or you're new."

"I'm new," he said, taking Steve's hand and shaking it. Steve noticed the way Brad's eyes were really dark in his pale, narrow face. It was a little unnerving, to be honest. "Martha said you'd be in. You've got brothers who are still in school?"

"Yeah," Steve replied, still kind of bothered whenever he had to refer to Jonathan as his "brother." He had yet to figure out a better way to explain why he'd moved with the Byers, so the lie would have to do for now. At least there wasn't an explanation he could give that made no mention of the fact that he and Jonathan were sleeping together. 

Steve tried to figure out why it would matter to Brad that his "brothers" were still in school. Oh, unless… "You're still in school too?"

Brad nodded. "Senior year, finally."

"Just graduated myself," Steve admitted, watching as Shirley seated a big family at one of the tables in his section.

"I go to Kennedy High," Brad said, moving like he was trying to keep Steve's attention. “Maybe I know your brothers."

"No, they go to East," Steve told him. "And you probably wouldn't know them anyway. We just moved to town."

"Really?" Brad smiled, and Steve didn't know what he was smiling about, but it was infectious. Steve smiled too. "Where from?"

"Oh, just Indianapolis. Not far away at all."

Brad shrugged one shoulder. "Far enough. I've only lived here my whole life."

"You hoping to leave someday?" Steve asked him.

Brad nodded. "Oh, yeah. I'd love to travel. See the world." He gave the diner a look of snobbish disdain. "Get out of this hellhole."

"It's not so bad," Steve insisted, waving at Shirley when she motioned him to the table she'd just seated. _At least it doesn't have monsters_.

"Maybe not for some people," Brad said, looking out at the customers. "But it is for me." The way he looked Steve up and down was familiar, but Steve was used to only getting that look from girls, and sometimes Jonathan.

Oh.

_Oh_!

Well, that was unexpected! So unexpected that Steve had no idea how to respond. If he got offended, that would probably be safest, but pretty damn hypocritical. If he said thanks, but no thanks, then Brad at least would know Steve recognized the look. Maybe it was best to just play dumb?

Steve said, "Cool. My girlfriend and I are thinking about heading to Chicago next year. See what that's like." Yeah, mentioning Nancy. That would do it. He pointed out to the dining room. "I gotta get working, though. Gotta make the big bucks for a move like that."

"Of course," Brad said with a friendly smile. "Don't let me get you into trouble."

Steve smiled back, glad he hadn't made things more awkward. "Get in enough trouble on my own. I sure don't need the help!"

Brad laughed as Steve left the counter area, feeling like maybe he was starting to make a new friend. And, hey. If he _was_ like Steve at all, it would be cool to have a friend who might know more stuff than what he and Jonathan had been able to figure out on their own.

He was still smiling when he got to his first table of the night. "Welcome to Big Dan's! What can I get started for you?"

~*~

Jonathan had been asleep for awhile, lying mostly on top of Steve, when he was woken up by Steve stirring. He made a noise of discomfort and shifted under Jonathan, so Jonathan gave him a little more space. Steve murmured again, turning his face toward Jonathan. In the dim light coming in through their bedroom window, Jonathan saw that Steve looked scared, or maybe in pain.

It was a nightmare.

Jonathan was unfortunately used to seeing Steve like this, although the frequency of the nightmares had dropped off significantly over the past few months.

"Hey," Jonathan said, putting his hand on the side of Steve's face, rubbing Steve's cheekbone with his thumb. "Baby, wake up. You're okay."

Steve turned away from him, which didn't usually happen.

"Steve?"

He went still, but it was a rigid-still, his muscles resisting when Jonathan tried to move his arm. Then Steve snatched his arm out of Jonathan's grasp and sat up.

Jonathan sat up with him. "Hey, are you okay? What's going on?" He tried to put his arm around Steve's shoulders, but Steve shrugged him off again.

He didn't say a word, or even look at Jonathan before getting out of bed.

Not sure if he was more hurt by or more concerned about Steve's behavior, Jonathan scrambled out of bed after him. "Steve? Steve!" Jonathan hissed, still not getting an answer.

He managed to get ahead of Steve out in the hallway, where he flipped the lightswitch on. Steve's eyes were open, but he didn't seem to be focused on anything. He certainly didn't seem to notice Jonthan.

Jonathan took Steve by the shoulders and shook him, whispering, "Steve! Steve! Wake up!"

Steve took a few more steps, running into Jonathan and making him stumble back before he caught his balance. 

Jesus Christ, this was ridiculous!

"No, Steve!" Jonathan blocked Steve's path, pushing back at Steve as best he could. When that didn't work, he did the only other thing he could think of.

Jonathan took half a step backward and then slapped Steve across the face. "Wake up, goddamn it!"

Nothing changed. Steve kept moving forward until Jonathan physically held him back. Will’s door opened behind Jonathan. “What’s going on?”

“I think he’s sleepwalking,” Jonathan whispered at Will, struggling to keep Steve from moving without knocking him down and maybe hurting him. “I can’t get him to wake up.”

Will was silent for a moment, and when Jonathan looked back at him, he was staring at Steve with an odd frown on his face. 

“What?” Jonathan asked in frustration. “Can I maybe get some help here?”

“Oh!” Will snapped out of whatever thought he’d been stuck in and moved forward to help Jonathan.

As soon as Will touched Steve’s arm, Steve’s forward motion stuttered. He stopped, standing stock still in the middle of the hallway, his open eyes still unseeing. 

“Steve?” Jonathan asked, shaking him by the shoulder again.

Finally, Steve blinked. His eyelids fluttered a few times before his eyes focused on Jonathan. “What’s going on?”

“Jesus Christ,” Jonathan swore, letting out a sigh of relief. When Steve frowned at him, Jonathan explained, “You were sleepwalking. I couldn’t wake you up.”

“I…” Steve looked around at the hallway, at Will, then at Jonathan again. “I don’t usually wake up standing. Weird.”

“Yeah.” Jonathan put a hand on Will’s shoulder, saying, “Thanks. I got it from here.”

Nodding, Will replied, “No problem.”

Jonathan took Steve by the hand, leading him back to their room. “Come on. Let’s get you back in bed.”

Steve chuckled and crowded Jonathan from behind. “Well, if you insist, babe.”

The come-on made Jonathan stifle a laugh. “No, really, Steve. If you’re sleepwalking, you must not be getting enough sleep.”

Steve closed the door behind them, and paused, letting Jonathan’s hand slip through his fingers. He looked pensive all of a sudden.

“What?” Jonathan asked. 

“I _haven’t_ been sleeping well,” he said, joining Jonathan and sitting on the edge of the bed. “Nancy’s not here.”

“And she’s not going to be, not until Thursday,” Jonathan pointed out. He crawled back into his spot on the bed and reached for Steve. “C’mon. Let’s make the best of it.”

“You know what would really help me get back to sleep?” Steve asked, sliding back into bed next to Jonathan.

“If you say a blow job, I swear to g–“

“You know, it’s like you read my mind,” Steve said, his lips grinning against Jonathan’s neck. “‘Cause I was just gonna say a bl–”

Jonathan pulled Steve into a kiss to get him to shut the hell up. Except then Steve ran his tongue along Jonathan’s bottom lip and suddenly maybe Jonathan wasn’t so sleepy anymore, either. 

Still, Jonathan couldn’t quite shake the thought that Steve had been heading somewhere in his sleep. The front door was down that hallway. So was the kitchen, and the stairs to the basement, and the door to El’s room. Whatever it was probably didn’t matter now. 

~*~

El heard a commotion outside her room, but it ended right as she was waking up. She could feel Steve’s confusion and Jonathan’s worry without even trying. She looked for Joyce, finding her still asleep, dreaming of happier times. She looked for Will, and he was a little closed off from her, a little harder to reach. But he was there, and safe.

This late at night, with the house silent and her room as dark as she’d been able to make it, and still half-asleep, it was easy for El to slip Inbetween and cast herself farther out. El went to Mike. She always went to Mike. He was asleep too, sprawled out on a bed that was rapidly getting too small for him. If she held on tight enough, she could crawl into the bed with him, and hold his hand, and put her head on his shoulder. 

Mike turned toward her in his sleep, mumbling something El didn’t understand. She closed her eyes. 

As she fell back asleep, Mike's image turned to smoke, but it was okay. He was safe, and so was she, even though they were so far apart. 

When El woke up in the morning, there was a little drop of blood on her pillow, but her head didn’t hurt. She felt like maybe she was getting stronger. Getting her battery recharged, as Mike would put it. 

It had been weeks since she’d first seen Hopper, weeks of waiting and getting stronger. Weeks of agony. It was time.

She got out of bed and crossed the hallway, knocking softly on Will's door. At first she thought he hadn't heard her knock, but then she sensed him moving. Eventually, he opened the door, and he seemed surprised to see it was her on the other side. "What's going on? It's Saturday, isn't it?"

"I want to find him," El told Will, lifting her chin to look more confident. At least, she presumed that's what it did. She'd seen a lady on a TV show explaining how to do it and why. 

Will blinked at her a few times, but eventually nodded. "Okay." He looked around his room, then asked, "Where should we…?"

"My room," El announced, leading him back across the hallway and shutting the door behind him. 

She took the blindfold from under her pillow and the radio from her shelves before sitting down on the bed. Then El got comfortable as she set the radio to static and turned up the volume. After handing the radio to Will, she put the blindfold up to her eyes and tied it tight around her head. 

El didn’t need to have a picture in her hands to make her way through the Inbetween to Hopper. She thought about the weight of his arms when he hugged her. She thought about the smell of his cigarettes and the way he smiled at her over dinner and the shape of every word in the letter she’d read daily for the first month he was gone.

And _there_.

There he was before her. Hopper. Dad. 

This time he was sitting at a table, hands cuffed to the chair, looking up at someone. El pushed just a little bit, expanding her view until she could see that someone. It was another soldier, wearing that strange uniform. It reminded El one of the men Papa wanted her to listen to. 

“How many ways can I say it?” Hopper asked the man. “I have _no idea_ what you’re talking about.”

It was harder to listen to the soldier than to Hopper, but a little more of a push took away the cotton in her “ears”. The soldier was saying, “…losing our patience with you, Mr. Hopper. If you don’t answer my questions, you will die here, in Mother Russia.”

“Pretty sure my mother was Norwegian,” Hop replied with a smile. El liked that smile. It meant he was feeling playful. 

The soldier didn’t like it. He hit Hopper, making him groan and making blood appear at the corner of his mouth. El wished she could push the soldier from where she was sitting, throw him like a doll and break his neck, but it didn’t work that way. The last time she’d tried to push away a thing she could see in the Inbetween, she’d torn open a gate to the Upside Down.

Out loud, she said to Will, “I think he’s in Russia.”

Distantly, she heard Will ask, “Can you tell where in Russia?”

“I can try to find out,” she said, expanding her view a little further. 

There was another soldier walking down the hallway outside the room where Hopper sat. El latched onto her, following her down the hallway and into an office. The soldier sat down at a desk and answered a ringing telephone. As she spoke, El threaded her voice through the radio.

“Can you hear her?” El asked Will.

“Yeah, I can,” he replied. “Is she speaking Russian?”

“I don’t know,” El told him. 

“Wait, keep going,” he told her, touching El’s shoulder and making El’s sight and hearing wobble. “I’m going to record this.”

Holding onto the image and the words was easier than El thought it should be. Maybe giving herself such a long rest from her powers had brought them back stronger. She smiled to herself, letting herself picture fleetingly her heroic rescue of Hopper.

The Russian soldier finished her conversation and put down the telephone. The radio beside El’s ear went back to static, for just a moment before Will spoke to her again, “Did you lose her?”

“No,” El assured him. “Start recording. We’ll follow her until we get something.”

“Got it.”

The telephone in front of the soldier rang and she picked it up. The tone of her words sounded like when El used to “follow” Hop around at work. A woman named Flo answered the phones there. She said the same words every time she answered it. “Hawkins Police Department. This is Flo speaking.”

Maybe the Russian soldier was saying similar words. Maybe someone on their side would be able to understand them. Maybe this soldier would lead them to Hopper. El could only hope.

They recorded two telephone conversations before El felt like she was starting to get tired. “Is that okay?” she asked Will. 

“Yeah,” he told her. “Yeah, this is great!”

~*~

A knock at the bedroom door woke Steve, pulling him out of a pleasant dream about sharing a plate of french fries with Nancy. Feeling lonely and hungry, Steve groaned and shoved his head under his pillow. Jonathan could deal with whoever it was.

He felt the bed dip as Jonathan got out of bed, and then the rumble of the dresser drawer, which meant he was putting on some clothes before answering the door. Steve pulled on the sheet covering him, making sure it was covering everything important. He kept his head under the pillow.

Unfortunately, he still heard it when Will told Jonathan, "We think we found Hopper."

_What_? Steve unburied himself from under the pillow and listened as Will held up a tape recorder and pressed play.

The recording was pretty staticy, but Steve could tell that it was a woman's voice, and that she was speaking another language. Actually, it reminded him a lot of Dustin's recording from over the summer. "Is that Russian?"

El nodded. "Hopper was talking to a man who said they were in Russia."

"We hope there's some clues in this recording so we can narrow down _where_ in Russia he is," Will said, stopping the recording. 

Jonathan looked back at Steve, who shrugged. "You want me to call Robin?"

Will shook his head. "What about that reporter? The one you," he pointed to Jonathan, "and Nancy know. Doesn't he speak Russian? Fluently?"

Steve shared a look with Jonathan. It wasn't a bad plan, actually. Still, Steve had to ask, "What do we do if we find out where he is? We can't exactly _go_ to Russia."

Will deflated a little bit, but El gave Steve a sort of scary look, insisting, "Hop would come for any of us."

Dammit, she was right.

"How would we get there?" Jonathan asked, sitting down on the bed like the realization they were going to have to do this hit him hard.

_Shit_. Steve licked his lips and then said, "I've got a few thousand saved up. That should be enough to get at least a couple of us there."

"Steve, no," Jonathan said, giving him a pained look. "We can't use your college money."

"Why not?" he asked, shrugging. "El is right. Hop would do whatever it took for any of us. It's just money."

"No," Jonathan said, like that was the end of it. "There has to be another way."

"We are just kids," Will pointed out, flinching when El gave him a betrayed look. "No, what I mean is that none of us have passports or anything. We have to tell someone in charge."

"The army," Steve said in agreement. "Plus, I'm pretty sure we would need more paperwork to get into an enemy country than just passports."

"I can get in," El told them.

"And let everyone know where you are in the process," Jonathan told her, shaking his head. "Mom will know who it's safe to call."

"What if this isn't enough for a location?" Will asked as he held up the recorder. "I can't bear the thought of telling her about this until we're sure."

"So we get it translated," Steve said, pushing his hands back through his hair. "And then we decide what to do with it from there."

Jonathan shrugged before looking first at Will, then at El. "He's your dad. It's your call."

"We should be sure," she declared with a nod. "Take the tape to someone who understands it. Tomorrow, I will try again."

"Okay," Jonathan said as he stood up. "We'll get ready and then Steve and I will go."

"But–" Will started to say, but Jonathan cut him off.

"But nothing. If you two want our help, you'll do it our way. Alright?"

Steve wasn't sure he liked the way Jonathan assumed Steve would automatically agree with him on every aspect of this. Sure, so far Steve _did_ agree with him. But it shouldn't have been a given.

El nodded first, with Will following her lead shortly after. Jonathan ushered them out of the room before turning back to Steve. "I'm not sure Murray's even still living in the same place. He said he was going to move."

"Do you know where?" Steve asked as he got out of bed and pulled on some underwear and pants.

Jonathan shook his head. "Nancy might."

Steve imagined how that phone call would go. "She's going to want in on this."

"Would that be a bad thing?"

Steve thought about the question for a second as he pulled on his shirt. Granted, Jonathan probably wanted to see Nancy just as badly as he did, but did that mean they had to put her in possible danger? Just because they wanted to see her? Then again, if she found out about it after the fact, she'd probably be really hurt if they didn't call her. "I guess if we're not bringing in Joyce yet, we probably do need her."

"Do you want to call? I need a shower."

That's how Steve ended up calling Nancy's house at nine o'clock on a Saturday morning.

"I promised not to give his location over the phone," Nancy told him. "Meet me at our place. The one from last month in, like, three hours."

"Got it," Steve told her. He opened his mouth to say that he loved her, but the line clicked dead.


	7. The Accident

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The gang reunites and a harrowing situation makes El realize a new ability.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: a car accident and some description of the resulting injuries.

"We made good time, is all," Steve told Jonathan, placing his hand over on Jonathan's bouncing knee. They sat together in Steve's car, parked in the parking lot of the motel they'd stayed at when they met Nancy last. 

Still not able to get over his nerves, Jonathan asked, "You're absolutely _sure_ this is where Nancy said to meet her?"

" _Yes_ ," Steve insisted. "We were half an hour early."

"But she's late."

"By _five minutes_." Steve squeezed Jonathan's knee again. "You need to chill, babe."

Steve was probably right, but what if he wasn't? What if their call had triggered something in Hawkins? What if the Federal agents associated with the lab had stopped Nancy? What if they already knew Hopper was still alive and had left him in Russia on purpose?

Jonathan grabbed the window handle and rolled it down a few inches.

"It's freezing out there," Steve protested.

Jonathan insisted, "I need to breathe."

Steve gave him a suspicious side-eyed look, but he didn't mention the window again. 

The Wheeler station wagon pulled into the lot, and Jonathan let out a relieved breath. Steve gave Jonathan a raised-eyebrow look that clearly said, "See?"

"Fine. You were right," Jonathan told him, getting out of the car.

Nancy got out of her car too, but so did Robin, Mike, Dustin, Max, and Lucas. Jonathan caught Nancy's eye and gestured to the crowd.

"They made me bring them," Nancy said as she gave Jonathan a hug.

"We're not even sure we have anything yet," Jonathan told her, watching Steve give Robin a tight hug, lifting her off her feet so she laughed.

"Where's El?" Mike asked, crowding close to Jonathan. More quietly, he asked, "She got her powers back?"

"Yes," Jonathan told him. "And we left her at home so Mom wouldn't get suspicious."

"Shit," Mike said with a deep sigh. 

"You couldn't wait another five days to see her?" Jonathan asked.

"Not if something like _this_ is going on," Mike insisted, looking down at Dustin and getting his nod.

Jonathan kind of hated the fact that Mike wasn't a foot shorter than him anymore.

Following Nancy over to where she was hugging Steve, Jonathan asked, "So, where is Murray?"

"I don't actually know," she told him, holding up a hand when Jonathan opened his mouth to protest. "I called the number he gave me from a payphone on the drive down. He's meeting us here."

"Here?" Jonathan asked, looking around at the group of them standing in the parking lot. "This is too open."

"We'll get a room," Nancy told him, heading for the office. Jonathan shared a look with Steve that told him he wasn't alone in leaping to a certain set of thoughts at Nancy's suggestion. It was just too bad they had so many others here with them.

As they all piled into the one room Nancy had rented, Jonathan regretted leaving Will and El behind. They would have enjoyed being here for this.

It honestly wasn't that long before a knock on the door cut short all the conversations in the room. Jonathan was closest to the door, so he checked through the peephole before opening the door. "Hey, Murray. Come on in."

Murray looked up into the room and stopped short on the threshold. "Well, if this isn't the sweetest little reunion?"

Jonathan shut the door behind him.

Addressing Nancy, Murray said, "Your phone call was wisely short on details. Before you give me any…" He pulled some sort of machine out of his jacket and started waving it around the room. "You never can be too careful."

Leaning toward Jonathan, Steve asked, "What's he doing?"

Before Jonathan could answer, Robin told Steve, "He's checking for bugs. You know? Listening devices?"

"Ah."

The kids watched Murray dubiously, until he finished scanning the whole room.

"Okay, we're good," Murray said, putting the device down on the motel table and sitting beside it. "What could possibly warrant my code red attention on a Saturday?"

"We think Hopper's alive," Jonathan told Murray, sitting across the table from him and placing Will's cassette recorder between them. "We recorded this from one of his captors."

Jonathan pressed play and everyone watched in silence as Murray listened. Eventually, the recording ended. Jonathan stopped the cassette.

Frowning for a few moments, eventually Murray asked, "How did you get this?"

"El can listen in from far away," Mike told him. "It's how we were able to find out Will was still alive in the Upside Down."

"Yes, right," Murray said dryly. "The girl with the superpowers. How could I have forgotten?"

"What does the recording say?" Nancy asked him.

Before Murray could respond, Robin said, "It's a woman answering the phone. She says something about a place called Kamchatka." When everyone stared at her, she said, "What? I've been practicing my Russian."

Murray made a weird face. "Why did you even call me in?"

"She's _right_?" Mike asked, while beside him, both Steve and Dustin gave Robin high fives. 

"Yeah, but the problem–" Murray said, frowning when Lucas bumped Murray's chair in his excitement to also high-five Robin. "The problem is that Kamchatka is a completely deserted base."

"Is it possible the Russians re-activated it?" Nancy asked.

"Why would they reactivate a remote base in Siberia – which all the intelligence agencies agreed was too expensive for Commies to run – during the _winter_?" Murray argued, sitting back and shaking his head. "Especially for one small-town police chief?"

"What if Hopper isn't the only thing they brought back from Hawkins?" Dustin asked, slowly sitting down on the bed behind him.

"What are you thinking?" Jonathan asked him.

Dustin looked around the room at the others. "They opened a gate to the Upside Down, right?" Some of the others nodded.

Then Jonathan saw Steve's jaw drop. "Oh, shit! And that's why they took it to the middle of nowhere, Siberia?"

"Yeah," Dustin said.

"Took what?" Jonathan looked around at the others to see if he was the only one not getting it.

"Erica and I saw a big, electrified cage when we were in the Russian base under Starcourt," Dustin explained.

"But how did they get it out?" Mike asked, leaning closer to Dustin.

Nancy spoke up, telling everyone, "Robin and I found a couple of secret passageways out of the base."

Disturbed not only by the fact that Nancy had been exploring an abandoned Russian base without him, but also very anxious about what was being implied by everyone else in the room, Jonathan cried, "What are you guys talking about?"

"A demogorgon," Mike said, looking at Jonathan like it should have been obvious.

"What do you mean a demogorgon?" Jonathan asked. "The gate is closed. Why would they need a cage of any sort? Shouldn't it be dead? You know, cut off? Like everything else from the Upside Down?"

"Just because the demodogs attacking us were flayed doesn't mean the whole species is under the mind flayer's control," Dustin explained, looking far too excited for a topic this pants-wettingly terrifying. "Not all the _people_ in Hawkins were flayed over the summer. Ergo, the demogorgons aren't necessarily all flayed either."

"So, what?" Robin asked him. "The Russians found a friendly demogorgon and brought it here?"

"I wouldn't call one of those things _friendly_ ," Steve told her.

"Children!" Murray cried, holding up his hands. "Even if the Russians managed to do this, there's just no evidence that Kamchatka has been reoccupied! You think I haven't been neck-deep in Russian intel since the summer? I'm telling you, Hopper is not there! He's dead!"

Incensed by the implication that El couldn't be trusted, Jonathan gave Murray a hard look and asked, "Did you see him die?"

After a second, he flinched away. "Well, no."

"You don't believe El?" Max asked him, hands on her hips. "Why would she lie?"

Murray sighed sadly. "Sometimes, when we want something very badly, we can lie to ourselves."

"Then where did the recording come from?" Robin asked, pointing to the recorder on the table.

Nancy looked at Jonathan with her eyebrows raised. He sighed, supposing she was right. And more evidence couldn't hurt, especially if it convinced Murray to be on their side. Still, "Are we sure we need more information from El? We'd have to bring my mom in on everything to get them here. I'm not sure she could handle it if we're wrong."

"Bring everyone else to them," Steve suggested with a shrug. "Start Thanksgiving early?"

"It's not that far from here," Jonathan said in agreement. "Okay."

"Okay," Nancy nodded. "Let's get on the road."

~*~

El huffed, frowning but pulling her shoes on just the same. 

"I know," Will told her, tying the laces on his sneakers. "But if we'd gone with, Mom would have known something was up."

She heard Joyce's footsteps approaching, so she didn't reply to Will out loud. Steve and Jonathan had gone to verify her tape on their own, and when El went Inbetween to check on them, they were with Mike, too!

It wasn't fair that they got to see Mike and she didn't!

"Okay, kids," Joyce said, swinging her keys in her hand happily. "Let's go."

"I'm not hungry," El told her.

Joyce frowned and held the back of her hand against El's forehead. "No fever. Come on. It's just dinner. How often do we get to eat together, just the three of us?"

"At least twice a week," El tried to point out, but Will made a face at her. He wanted her to stop trying to stay home. Perhaps he was right. It would make Joyce suspicious. She sighed and rolled her eyes, but followed the others out to the car.

Will automatically got in the back seat, and El figured he thought he should give her the front seat since she was already in a bad mood. Feeling even more contrary (one of Hopper's favorite words of the day), El went around the car and got in the back, behind Joyce.

"Okay," Joyce said carefully, giving El a look. She shrugged and got into the car without asking El why she was sitting in that seat. Instead, she started the car and said, "I think you guys are really going to like this place."

Putting on his seat belt, which El did as well, Will asked, "Is it another coupon?"

"Do you think I'm made of money?" Joyce asked with a laugh. "Of course it's a coupon!"

As they got underway, El imagined what it would look like if Joyce _was_ made out of money. It was a pretty funny image.

El closed her eyes, leaning back in her seat and trying not to count the seconds before Mike was supposed to come visit. It had been easier when his visit was further away, off in the vague future that wasn't less than a week away. Now it was close and Mike was close and El couldn't help but feel more frustrated with every passing second. 

At some point, the radio cut out, filling the car with static. El felt herself slipping Inbetween out of habit, and she used the opportunity to find Mike again. Finding him was easier than finding anyone else. 

She'd had a lot of practice over the past two years.

He was riding in his sister's station wagon, his knees pressed against the back of Nancy's chair. He looked worried about something, and El hoped that meant Jonathan and Steve had convinced the others to get help for Hopper. She hated not being able to help him directly. He'd held out in that prison for so long, but what if they were too late? What if _she_ was too late, and Hopper died before they could rescue him?

Movement out of the corner of her mind's eye caught El's attention.

"Oh, there you are," said a voice from that direction.

El whipped around to look at the speaker, releasing her hold on Mike's image. An older boy, with dark blonde hair and pale skin stood there, clearly looking at her.

"I've been looking for you for a long time, Eleven," he said with a friendly smile. 

Eleven knew better than to trust that smile. Papa's smile had always been friendly like that. "Who are you?"

The boy stepped closer, holding out his right wrist. El could see a small tattoo there, and when she took a step closer, she could read it. "Nine."

"You didn't think you and Kali were the only survivors of that lab, did you?" he asked, putting his hands in his pockets and shaking his head while he made a tutting noise.

El narrowed her eyes at him. "Brother?"

"Quite literally, yes," he said, which El didn't understand. He looked at her for a moment before saying, "Nevermind. Like I said, I've been looking for you, out here in the black."

"Inbetween," she told him.

He smiled again. "Isn't it, though?"

Before she could ask what he meant, El was jolted out of the Inbetween when she was thrown forward against her seatbelt, lightly at first. Then with a terrible crunching noise, she was thrown more violently. He head whipped forward, and then back. The motion made her disoriented and stole her breath away. On top of that it _hurt_.

Eventually, she was able to take a breath and blink and look up. The front of Joyce's car was inside the back of another car. The windshield was cracked and shattered, but somehow not all over the inside of the car, like when El broke all the windows at the cabin. In the front seat, Joyce wasn't moving. Beside her, Will groaned and shifted in his seat, slowly reaching for his seat belt buckle.

Scared about Joyce, El reached for her, saying, "Mama?" She hadn't meant to say that word, but it was the one on her lips. "Mom?"

"Mom?" asked Will, moving forward as his belt clicked free. "Mom? Are you okay?"

Joyce stirred, moaning a little. El got her own seat belt unbuckled. "What happened?"

"We crashed," Will said, moving further over the seat to look at Joyce. "Oh, god."

"What?"

"Mom, don't move," Will said, giving El a scared look. "She hit her head."

El knew that could be bad. After Starcourt, while El had been sitting with Mike in the back of the ambulance, the medic had asked all sorts of questions about how hard he'd hit his head and how long he'd been unconscious. She got the impression that the wrong answers to these questions would have made the medic very worried.

Suddenly, the door on El's side of the car opened at the same time as the one on Will's side. A man reached in, grabbing El's arm and yanking her.

"Hey, get off!" Will cried, kicking at another man on his side of the car. He was trying to take Will away from her!

El wrenched her arm free and dove in Will's direction. She grasped his hand, and when she tried to push the men away from them, it felt different than before. Insead of being pushed away, the men both disappeared. El didn't even feel a trickle of blood under her nose.

"What was that?" Will asked, his eyes wide.

"I don't know," El told him, stepping out of the car. A white fleck of something floated down in front of her face. Then another fell. She looked up, but it wasn't snow. The sky was clear. El sniffed the air and it smelled like death.

As Will climbed out of the car after her, El heard the sound of sirens approaching. She looked to Will, and he was looking back at her. "You saved us," he said.

"I don't–" she started to say, but Will turned back toward the car. He opened Joyce's door and crouched down next to her.

"Are you okay, baby?" Joyce asked weakly, blood dribbling down the right side of her face from the deep cut on her forehead.

Someone's footsteps ran toward them, and El put her hand on Will's shoulder, getting between him and this new threat. Except, it was a lady about Joyce's age and she stopped moving toward them when she saw El's face. "Is everyone okay?"

El could feel it now, how _easy_ it would be to push the lady away if she needed to. She took a step toward the lady, letting go of Will's shoulder. The easy feeling faded.

Will stood up next to El, grasping her arm and shouting to the woman, "Our mom is hurt."

The easy feeling returned. El could see how she could just push the lady _sideways_ a step. Into the Upside Down. She wouldn't even need a gate, or the Inbetween. Just Will's hand in hers. Like a road map. Like a guide. A short cut.

The woman shouted back, "I called. An ambulance is coming."

"Thank you," Will said, waving to her. To El, he said, "I think we should let the paramedics move her. As long as we're safe here?" He said this last part as a question.

El nodded, keeping Will's hand folded tightly in hers. "We're safe enough."

"Who were those guys?" he asked.

She told him, "I don't know," as she remembered meeting Nine in the Inbetween. "But I think I know where I sent them."

~*~

Nancy pulled into the driveway behind Steve's car, noting where Jonathan's was parked on the street in front of the house. It was a cute little house, a bit of an upgrade from the old Byers house in Hawkins. Nancy already liked it.

Beside her, Jonathan said, "Come on."

Ahead of them, Steve and Robin got into the house first, but Nancy and Jonathan were close behind.

"Hello?" Steve called into the dark house as he flipped on the lights. "We brought home guests!"

"Where would they go?" Nancy asked.

Steve looked back at Jonathan and together they said, "Saturday dinner."

"You guys are creepy," Robin told them, looking around the front living area. Nancy got all but pushed further into the house as the younger kids flowed in behind them.

"Where do they usually go for Saturday dinner?" Nancy asked, looking at her watch. It was still pretty early, despite the sun having gone down already. "When will they be back?"

As if in response to Nancy's question, the telephone rang.

Steve picked it off the table next to the easy chair, and easily said, "Hello?" As he listened, his eyes went wide. "Shit, are you okay?"

Nancy shared a look with Jonathan. He got over to Steve and the phone in about three wide strides. 

"Where are you?" Steve asked, then he said, "Springfield General. Okay. We'll be there right away."

"What happened?" Jonathan demanded, grabbing Steve's arm.

"It's gonna be okay," Steve told him, hanging up the phone. When Jonathan wavered a little on his feet, Steve held him. "There was a car accident."

"Who is it?" Jonathan demanded. Nancy felt sick. She went to them.

"Mom," Steve said, helping Nancy steady Jonathan when he staggered again. "She's doing okay right now. Alright, Jonathan? She's hurt, but they're taking care of her."

Jonathan nodded, but he grabbed tightly to Steve, his shoulders shaking. Nancy rubbed her hand gently across his back.

"Do you know how to get there?" Robin asked Steve softly over Jonathan's shoulder.

"No," Steve told her, sniffling.

"Phone book?"

Steve took one of his hands off Jonathan and pointed toward an open archway. When Robin went through and turned on the light, it looked like it was probably the kitchen.

"It'll be okay," Nancy said, keeping her hands on Jonathan as he stepped back from Steve and wiped his eyes. The kids around them looked as stricken as Nancy felt.

"Who did you talk to?" Jonathan asked Steve.

"Will," Steve told him. "He said El was with them."

"Good." Jonathan nodded and Nancy could see him pulling himself together. "I'm glad none of them are alone."

Murray stepped closer, narrowing his eyes at Nancy. "Who called you about…" He looked around suspiciously before crossing the living room and turning on the TV. After turning the volume all the way up, he returned to Nancy's side. "What was said on the phone?"

"Steve called," Nancy told him. "And all he said was that El had seen Hopper and he needed to contact you about it."

Turning to Steve, Murray asked, "Did you use my name? My full name?" He directed this question at Nancy, too.

"No," Nancy answered for Steve. "In fact, he called you Marty, but I knew who he meant." Nancy narrowed her eyes at him as Robin came back into the room. " _Why_?"

"Sometimes an 'accident' is anything but," Murray said with a slow, significant nod.

Speaking over the television, Robin lifted the yellow pages. "I found it!"

"Let's go," Nancy said, stopping when she noticed Mike and his friends heading for the door too. "We don't all need to go to the hospital. I can bring El and Will back here."

"And be separated when another 'accident' happens?" Mike asked with a scoff. "I don't think so."

"We're all going," Max told Nancy, her jaw tightly square.

Nancy sighed. She supposed they had a point. To Robin, she asked, "Will you go with Steve and Jonathan? Navigate? I'll follow."

Robin nodded. "Let's go."

Murray ended up in Steve's car as well, likely to avoid spending time with the younger kids. Mike sat up front, next to Nancy. She pulled out of the driveway and backed up the road, making room for Steve's car. Then Nancy looked over at Mike and told him, "I'm sure El is fine."

Mike nodded. "Yeah."

When they got to the hospital and parked, Nancy had to run to catch up with Jonathan and Steve. Jonathan just about crashed into the information desk inside the front doors. “I’m looking for my mom,” he said breathlessly. “Joyce Byers.”

The man behind the desk took a look at the pages in his clipboard. “Was she just brought in today?”

“Yes!” Jonathan pushed his hands back through his hair in frustration. 

Steve kind of shouldered his way in front of Jonathan in a way that Jonathan didn’t seem to mind, which surprised Nancy. “Hi, sorry. Our brother and sister called from here. There was a car accident?”

The rest of the group came up behind them, earning more of a look from the man.

“If she just came in, she’s likely still in one of the emergency department bays.” He pointed to a hallway. “Follow the signs and talk to the nurse at the desk.”

“Okay,” Jonathan said, squeezing Nancy’s arm as he passed her and rushed down the hallway. Nancy and Steve followed closely on his heels, with the rest of the group trailing after. 

As they entered the right area, Jonathan took a sharp left turn. At first Nancy thought he’d gone the wrong way, but when she cleared the corner, she saw him with Eleven in his arms. She looked a little scratched up, but okay, and she pointed him to an open doorway as he let her go. Steve stopped to hug El too, but Nancy followed Jonathan into the room. 

Joyce was lying in the bed, unconscious. Her head was wrapped in bandages, and there was a cast on her left arm. She looked so _small_.

Will was sitting in the chair next to Joyce, and when he looked up at them, it reminded Nancy of finding Jonathan next to a similar hospital bed back in Hawkins, when no one was sure whether or not Will was going to wake up after nearly dying in the Upside Down. Will stood, and Jonathan’s hug almost knocked him over. 

At Nancy’s shoulder, Steve asked, “Is she still…?”

“We’re still waiting,” Will said, wiping a tear from under his cheek. Nancy couldn’t help it. She went and gave him a hug, too. “Apparently it’s a good sign that she was talking after the crash.”

“What happened?” Jonathan asked, sitting on the bed next to Joyce, and facing Will. Nancy watched as Steve sat down next to Jonathan, putting his arm around Jonathan’s shoulders. 

Shrugging, Will sat back down. “I don’t know. The car ahead of us stopped really suddenly. There wasn’t enough time to slow down.”

Jonathan and Steve both turned to look at Joyce, but Nancy saw the way Will opened, then closed his mouth. 

“What is it?” she asked him. 

Will’s gaze slipped to something behind Nancy, and when she looked, El and Mike were standing there. Behind Nancy, Will said, “Something happened. After the crash.” When she turned, he was looking at El.

“What was it?” Steve asked.

El took a few more steps into the room. Her eyes tearing up, she whispered, “Someone found me.”

“Who?” Nancy asked, sharing a worried look with Mike. 

“He called himself Nine,” she said, holding up her tattooed wrist. 

“He’s like you?” Nancy asked her, and El nodded. 

“He found me, in there. In the Inbetween.”

Nancy wasn’t familiar with the term. She looked at the others, but it was only Will who seemed to know what she meant.

“She means the dark place, the place her mind goes when she’s visiting people,” he explained. Biting his lip he nodded at El, “Tell them the other thing.”

Before El could do that, a nurse came into the room. “I’m sorry, but we can’t have this many people in the room. Or out in the hallway, for that matter. One of you can stay, but for the rest? There’s a waiting room out in the main hall.”

“I’ll stay,” Jonathan told the others, sharing a look with Steve before he nodded and stood up. Nancy missed being the person Jonathan didn’t have to talk to except with his facial expressions. It had only been three months. Had she really missed that much?

Nancy went to him, giving Jonathan a hug, and kissing his cheek. “We’ll be right out there, if you need anything at all.”

Jonathan nodded, pulling her into a gentle kiss before letting her go.

Out in the waiting room, Nancy joined the others as a close huddle formed. She ended up pressed between Mike and Steve, with El and Will on Mike’s other side, Robin on Steve’s other side, and everyone else arranged around the rest of the circle. Except for Murray. He was in the corner of the waiting room, helping himself to a cup of coffee.

“After the crash,” Will said, looking at El for a second before his gaze rounded the circle of them, “two men tried to pull us out of the car. I didn’t see where they came from.”

“They _tried_ ,” Steve said, giving El a wink. “What happened to them?”

“That’s the thing,” Will answered. “They just… disappeared.”

“I pushed them,” El said, giving Will a significant look. “But it’s like I pushed them _sideways_.”

“Not the direction you were trying for?” Lucas asked her.

Frowning, El shook her head. “No, like…” She huffed, and Nancy recognized that look of frustration. She wasn’t finding the right words. 

“Do you want to show us?” Nancy asked her, earning a horrified look. “No, I mean show us on something other than a person. Like…” Nancy looked around, spotting an empty coffee cup on one of the tables. She grabbed it and set it on the floor in the middle of the circle. “Show us on that?”

El nodded. Nancy watched as she deliberately wrapped her fingers around Will’s wrist, and then flicked her head sideways. The cup was gone. The others around the circle murmured. 

“You disintegrated it?” Mike asked, and when El gave him a look he clarified. “I mean, you broke it into tiny little pieces?”

El shook her head. “I _pushed_ it.”

“Pushed it where?” Max asked her.

El looked around at the others, stopping when she got to Mike, and telling him, “To the Upside Down.”

Nancy got a shiver up her spine at the mention of that place. She shook it out as she looked at how everyone else was reacting. Steve pulled Nancy closer, and the others mostly looked at each other. 

Keeping her voice low, Nancy had to ask the obvious question that popped into her head. “Does that mean there’s another gate open?”

“Not again!” Dustin cried, throwing his hands up and taking a few steps away from the circle before returning to it.

“I don’t know,” El told him. “I think … maybe Will _is_ a gate.”

Will didn’t seem as surprised by this guess as everyone else, and Nancy wondered if they’d discussed it while waiting for the others to arrive. 

“How can a person be a gate?” Robin asked.

El and Will looked at each other and shrugged. Will told them, “We don’t know. El just says she can only do it when she’s holding my hand.”

“Wonder twin powers activate,” Max said with awe in her voice. 

Nancy figured it had to be from a comic book or something, because Mike and his friends all let out a sort of “Ohhhh” of understanding. Robin seemed to be in on the joke as well. Steve just shrugged, and El looked around at the others blankly.

Jonathan came back into the room, looking a lot less stressed out than he had ten minutes previous. Smiling, he told the others, “She woke up. She won’t believe me that you’re _okay_ ,” he directed this at Will and El, “but she’s awake.”

“We should…?” Will asked, pointing toward Joyce’s room.

Jonathan nodded. “Yeah.”

Nancy noticed the way Mike watched El and Will walk together, hand-in-hand. The jealousy was painfully obvious. Nancy would have given him shit for it, but she’d just spent the past few hours being jealous of how close Steve and Jonathan had gotten in her absence. What was that saying about glass houses?

Steve must have noticed too, because he put his arm around Mike and talked to him in a low voice as he steered them to a corner of the waiting room. 

Jonathan pulled Nancy into a hug, holding her as close as possible without crushing her. “Thanks,” he mumbled into her shoulder.

“For what?” she asked, holding him.

“For being here. I miss you when you’re not.”

Blinking away a few tears, Nancy asked, “Even though you’ve got Steve?”

“It’s different.”

Nancy thought about the way she felt about Jonathan and the way she felt about Steve, and yeah. It was different. The same, but also different. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Yeah, it is.”


	8. The Sideways Step

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nine catches up to El at the hospital.

As it got to be late in the evening, the kids started dropping off to sleep, one-by-one. Steve thought about suggesting they take everyone back to the house so everyone could sleep, but he knew he wasn’t going to be able to tear Jonathan away from Joyce’s side. Will probably wouldn’t go either. If Will wouldn’t go, El wouldn’t either, since she was sticking to him like glue. 

Steve had noticed the way Mike looked at the two of them. He’d seemed angry, or even betrayed, so Steve took it upon himself to set the record straight. He had never seen Will act anything other than brotherly around El. 

In fact, and Steve didn’t tell this to Mike, but he had never seen Will look at _any_ girl like that. Or any _boy_ for that matter. He’d asked Jonathan about it once, not sure if he was just being oblivious or what. Apparently Jonathan hadn’t seen Will show an interest in anyone either, and followed it up by telling Steve, “Just leave him be about it.” So Steve had. 

Sitting in the waiting room, watching others sleep; but unable to drift off himself, Steve realized that Robin had gone to the bathroom a really long time ago. He decided he’d probably better go look for her. He gave Nancy a kiss on the cheek and whispered, “Be right back.”

Steve headed for the bathrooms, stopping when he got there and wondering if anyone would mind him sticking his head in the women’s room just to check. Before he tried it, he heard Robin’s voice from further down the hallway. 

Steve headed that way and turned a corner, finding Robin standing next to one of the nurse’s desks, talking to one of the nurses. 

“There you are,” he said, walking over and giving the nurse a nod. The nurse didn’t look particularly happy to see him. “I thought maybe you fell in.”

“I’m _fine_ ,” Robin said, giving Steve a facial expression that he knew was supposed to tell him something. He just didn’t know what. Was she not fine? She looked okay. Maybe a little tired, but otherwise okay. 

“You’re sure?”

Robin smiled, and Steve was pretty sure she wanted to kill him. But _why_ did she want to kill him? Eventually, Robin huffed and said, “I’ll be back in a minute, alright?” She flicked her eyes over toward the nurse, and that’s when Steve got it. 

She was trying to get laid!

Holding up his hands, Steve said, “Alright. Sorry I bothered you!”

He backed away and headed for the waiting room again, wondering how Robin could tell that nurse in particular was interested in her. Maybe Robin was wrong and she was just nice. Steve had definitely made that mistake before. 

Hoping he wouldn’t have to be in the position of trying to figure out whether someone was attracted to him or not ever again, Steve took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he walked. 

He was on his second breath when he heard Nancy yelling, “Mike! What the hell?” 

It wasn’t Nancy’s usual tone of voice for yelling at her brother. In fact, she sounded scared. Steve’s heart sped up and he ran the last few steps toward the waiting room. 

When he rounded the corner, he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing. El was holding the side of her head, looking at Mike with horror. Mike’s face was scarily blank as he tried to get to El. Nancy and Lucas had Mike by the arms, holding him back, away from El.

“What the fuck?” Steve asked, hurrying forward and throwing his arms around Mike’s chest from behind. The kid was tall, but not particularly heavy or strong. Holding him back took some effort, but not so much that Steve was scared they would lose. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Nancy told him, still pulling on her brother’s arm. “One second he was asleep, and the next he slammed El’s head against the wall!”

Max and Dustin came into the room, Will trailing along behind them. All three of them stopped when they saw the struggle going on. 

“He found me again,” El said, tears in her eyes as she reached for Will. Will and Max both went to her, and suddenly, Mike stopped struggling. 

He went limp, sagging back against Steve, who just barely managed to catch him. 

Looking up at El, Steve asked, “ _Who_ found you?”

“Nine,” she said.

Mike stirred in Steve’s arms, but he didn’t try to pull away or go after El or anything. Nancy patted her brother’s cheek, asking him, “Are you awake?”

“Yeah,” Mike muttered, getting his feet underneath him and looking back at Steve with utter confusion on his face. “What happened?”

Before anyone could answer him, Jonathan strode into the room. His face was blank and he was heading straight for Eleven. “Jesus, not again!” Steve cried, letting go of Mike and putting himself between Jonathan and El.

Jonathan took a swing at him. Steve ducked by reflex, and when he came back up, he did the only thing he could think of. He pushed Jonathan. “Come on! Wake up! This isn’t you!”

Jonathan’s only response was to grab Steve and try to twist him to the ground. Steve managed to grab Jonathan tightly enough that he didn’t go down, but it was close. 

“Jonathan!” Nancy cried, pulling on one of his arms. “You don’t want to do this!”

Jonathan ducked out of Steve’s hold and turned on Nancy. His fist hit her face. Steve watched in horror as Nancy fell to the ground, hitting her head on the floor when she didn’t catch herself in time. 

“God dammit, Jonathan!” Steve shouted, holding his arms back so his next swing wouldn’t hit Lucas. At the others, Steve shouted, “Get El out of here!”

Max was the first to move, dragging El out of the room with Will close on their heels. As Steve locked his elbows around Jonathan’s arms and laced his hands together at the back of Jonathan’s neck, holding him steady, he shouted to the others, “Everyone get out of here! I don’t know how long I can hold him!”

Dustin and Lucas got Nancy to her feet, following after the others. Steve held onto Jonathan as best he could. Even though he was taller and stronger than Jonathan, he could tell he was also tiring faster. It wouldn’t be long before his hold started to slip. 

“Wake up, baby,” Steve muttered as they struggled, Jonathan pulling this way and that as he tried to get free. “Please! Don’t do this!”

Steve’s hold broke and Jonathan slipped away, running down the hall after the others. Steve’s lungs burned and his legs ached as he tried to keep up. He turned a corner, only to find Jonathan pushing Dustin to the ground and punching Lucas. 

“Jonathan!” Nancy cried, grabbing at him, and catching another punch before Steve could get there and stop it. 

His heart _hurt_ , and not just from sprinting. Watching Jonathan, who he trusted more than anyone in the world, bloody Nancy’s face – Nancy, the girl they both loved – broke Steve’s heart. He knew what he had to do. He had to take Jonathan down, and prevent him from hurting anyone else.

Except that when Steve got between Jonathan and El, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t punch Jonathan. As strange as he was acting, this was still the person Steve slept next to every night. He was still the boy who liked to trace Steve’s face with his fingertips before they kissed. He was still the one who held Steve after every single nightmare and told him it was going to be okay, that he was safe.

Even to prevent Jonathan from hurting the others, Steve couldn’t do it. The best he could do was keep himself between Jonathan and El. The best he could do was take the punches as they came, rattling his head and making his mouth taste like blood. 

~*~

**_10 minutes prior_ **

Sitting at his mother's bedside in the hospital, Jonathan felt sadly like he was used to this. Both times before, it had been Will in that bed. Jonathan couldn't say that having his mother there was any better or worse. It was just as bad. 

Exhaustion swept over him. It had been a long day full of driving, on top of a long night with not much sleep. He scooted down, laying his head against the back of the chair. His mom was okay. She had a concussion and a broken arm, and would probably have a scar on her forehead for the rest of her life, but she was okay. She was sleeping now, and probably would be until the nurse came in and woke her up. Jonathan could let go for just a minute, right?

He could let himself try to sleep, just for a little while. The others were out in the waiting room. They would wake him if they needed him. Jonathan drifted off.

When he woke up, his whole body ached, but especially his right hand. Looking down his arm, he realized that his fingers were wrapped tightly around Will’s neck, squeezing. 

Horrified, Jonathan let go. This had to be some sort of nightmare! Will coughed and sputtered, staggering away from him and back toward El. El had her hand out, and Jonathan realized that she was holding a scalpel to Jonathan’s neck. Terrified of what would happen if she decided she needed to cut him, Jonathan put both his hands up. “Whoa!”

The edge of the scalpel nicked his neck, the pain sharp and burning. Maybe this wasn't a dream...

As best he could without putting more pressure on the scalpel at his throat, Jonathan looked around. Mike, Dustin, Max, and Lucas were all held against the wall, struggling to break free from El’s invisible hold on them, trying to get to her. Steve and Nancy both lay at his feet, unmoving. Oh, god!

“Did I…?” he tried to ask, realizing that most of the aches in his hands came from his bloody and battered knuckles. “I’m sorry!”

Will looked at him like he used to look at Lonnie, hurt and betrayed, and Jonathan’s heart broke. Hot tears flooded his eyes and he held a hand out toward his brother. “I’m sorry! I don’t know what happened!”

Looking around at all the destruction he must have caused, Jonathan told Will, “You have to get El out of here. Get her away from everyone else!”

Eyes wide and a hand on his throat, Will nodded. He grabbed El by the wrist, and they ran. The scalpel dropped to the ground at the same time El’s hold on the other kids broke. They charged after her and Will. 

Jonathan tried to grab at least one of them, but his whole body felt shaky and exhausted, like all of his strength had been used up without him being awake for it. He dropped to his knees in the middle of the hospital hallway, crawling until he could put a hand each on Nancy and Steve. 

Relieved that they were both breathing, that he hadn’t killed the two people he loved best in the entire world, Jonathan collapsed. He put his forehead on the cool floor and curled in on himself. Exhausted and overwhelmed, he cried.

~*~

El ran through the hospital with Will at her side. It was the middle of the night, so there weren't too many people around, but El just kept wondering when Nine was going to make someone else leap out at her. Her friends, her _friends,_ were still chasing her, and gaining as El started to get tired.

"In here!" Will cried, pulling El through a door. She found herself in a dark little closet, and she wasn't fast enough to stop Will before he closed the door and locked it.

The others banged up against the door, and between the loud noise and the complete darkness of the closet, El shrieked. It was too small in here! Too dark! The door rattled and banged, and on the other side, Dustin said, "Come on, Eleven! You’re all alone in there! Just let your friends take you to me. Otherwise, I might just have to hurt them…"

"What do we do?" Will asked, his trembling hands finding hers in the dark.

Shaking her head and holding on tightly to Will, El said, "I don't know."

This time it was Mike's voice calling through the door. "Eleven! That was a nice trick you did before, killing my puppets. It took me a few hours to find you again. But these are your friends, aren't they? You won't kill _them_ , will you? Just give up!"

His voice a shaky whisper in her ear, Will said, "He doesn't know what you did to those guys back at the crash scene. He thinks you killed them."

"They're probably dead by now," El told him, reliving the moment when she found Barb in the Inbetween, dead and rotting. She shivered. 

"But you didn't kill them," Will pointed out. "He just thinks you did. He can't reach the Upside Down."

"Not without a gate," El realized.

"Not like you can."

El squeezed Will's hands, flinching when a loud bang was accompanied by a crack in the wooden door between them and the others. "Not like _we_ can," El corrected him.

"If we send the others to the Upside Down, Nine won't be able to use them against us anymore," Will told her. "And then we'll figure out how to get them back."

Gasping in horror, El said, "I can't–" BANG! The door cracked further. They were almost through. "I can't send them _there_. I'd rather _die_!"

BANG! CRACK!

"Well, can you bring–bring _us_ there? And back again."

El thought about it. She held on tight to Will and the Upside Down was right there beside them. Just a step to the side. She could feel the cold of it, and almost smell the decay.

CRACK! WHAM! 

The door opened, and Eleven _pulled_ Will with her into the Upside Down.

~*~

Nancy woke up on the floor, Jonathan shaking her shoulder and saying, "Come on. Please wake up! Nancy!"

A sharp pain in her head made Nancy feel like throwing up, but she held it together long enough to get her eyes focused on Jonathan's face. His facewas red, and his eyes wet. He'd been crying. "What happened?" she asked, sitting up. Steve was on the ground a few feet away, pressing his hands to his eyes and groaning.

"I hurt you," Jonathan said, pulling Nancy into his arms. "I'm so sorry!"

"Where are the others?" Nancy asked, looking around the hospital hallway over Jonathan's shoulder. Murray approached them with furrowed brows, a bagel in his mouth and a cup of coffee in his hand. "Jonathan, _where are the others_?"

Jonathan pointed to the end of the hallway. "They went right."

Scrambling, Nancy got her feet under her and ran in the direction he indicated. She swayed a little, running her shoulder into the far wall as she tried to make the turn. She followed a loud banging noise, turning another corner to see Mike and his friends pounding on a door. Lucas' foot went through the bottom of the door, and then it opened. All four kids fell into the closet and _vanished_.

Terrified of what might have happened to them, Nancy sprinted down the hallway. The door they'd been pounding on was splintered and open, showing Nancy a shallow closet beyond. It was empty, so where had they gone? On her next gasping breath inward, Nancy choked on a piece of _something_ floating through the air. As she coughed, trying to get it out of her throat, Nancy quaked with fear. She pushed herself up against the wall, panting and coughing as she realized it was a smell that had set her off. 

It smelled like Death. 

It smelled like the Upside Down.

Nancy had a sudden horrible realization. She knew where the kids had vanished to. Where Mike had vanished to. She knew where El had taken them.

Jonathan appeared at the end of the hallway, limping toward her. For a moment she thought the vacant look in his eyes and his shuffling walk meant that she needed to run, but he turned back and waved someone over. She hadn't seen anyone else who'd been affected do that. 

Feeling more like she needed him than she needed to worry about her own safety, Nancy ran to Jonathan. Steve and Murray rounded the corner just as Nancy reached Jonathan and grabbed him tight. Steve wrapped his arms around both of them.

"Where did everyone else go?" Murray asked, looking back down the hallway. Footsteps approached and Robin joined them, looking more than a little concerned.

Nancy tried to answer Murray's question, but her throat felt thick and the words wouldn't come.

Steve put himself in Nancy's line of sight, his fingers light on her face. "Nance, what happened? Where did they go?"

Choking on the burning pain in her chest, Nancy swallowed a few times before she could answer him. "The-the Upside D-down. She took them."

"Who?" Robin asked, her hand on Nancy's arm. "Who took them?"

Jonathan spoke for her. "El took them." He loosened his hold on Nancy. "Let's get back to Mom. Make sure she's still safe."

Nancy was nodding before her thoughts caught up with her. "Jonathan. _Will_ was with them."

"I know," he said, sniffing as a tear ran down his cheek. He wiped it away. "And I hate it too, but what am I supposed to do, Nancy? It's not like we can follow them. It's not like standing here in the hallway is going to do anyone any good."

"N-no, you're right," she admitted, taking Jonathan's hand and walking with him back toward the emergency room. Steve put his hand in her free one, squeezing it. 

As they walked, Steve gave Robin and Murray a recap of everything that had happened in the few minutes they were gone. 

"So, you were possessed or something?" Robin asked Steve.

" _I_ wasn't," Steve insisted. "But Mike was, and then Jonathan, and then the other kids."

"You weren't tonight," Jonathan told him, stopping and looking up at Steve. "What about last night?"

Steve shook his head. "Last night?" He blinked a few times. "I thought you said I was sleepwalking."

"I've never seen you sleepwalk," Nancy realized. "You did last night?"

Without letting Steve answer, Jonathan told him, "You could have been heading for El's room."

"You think I was trying to hurt her?" Steve sounded horrified, but Nancy couldn't tell if he was horrified at the thought of hurting El, or at Jonathan thinking he would, or both.

"All I know is that I couldn't stop you," Jonathan replied.

Steve asked him, "So what did stop me?"

Jonathan angled his head toward where Robin and Murray were getting ahead of them, and started walking again. "I don't know. One second I was slapping your face and trying to figure out how to wake you up, and then you _were_ awake."

"The slap woke him up?" Nancy asked, thinking it couldn't be the same, because she'd hit Jonathan and nothing changed.

"No," Jonathan said, squeezing Nancy's hand harder and giving a growl of frustration. "It was something else. He wasn't there at all, and then he was." Then Jonathan got a surprised look on his face. "Will came out of his room. He touched your arm. _That's_ what woke you up."

"So, what woke _you_ up?" Nancy asked Jonathan. "I was … unconscious."

Jonathan gave her a guilty look. "Nancy, I'm so–"

"Save it," Nancy insisted, following Robin and Murray into Joyce's room. "What could you see when you woke up?"

Frowning, Jonathan told her, "My hand. Wrapped around Will's–” He cleared his throat and shook his head. "I was touching Will."

"Where is Will?" Joyce asked from her bed, her voice tired and weak.

"Mom, I–" Jonathan started to say, but Steve stopped him with a hand on his chest.

"We'll find him," Steve promised, giving Nancy a panicked look.

"I'm sure he's close," Joyce said, closing her eyes and settling back down on her pillow. "It feels like he's close."

Jonathan's eyes went wide and he turned Nancy back toward the door, calling over his shoulder, "We'll find him, Mom!"

"What are you thinking?" Nancy asked as Jonathan and Steve both huddled close. 

"She can tell Will is close," Jonathan said. "Just like when he was lost in the Upside Down."

"But how?" Nancy asked. "There's no gate. How can there be any sort of, I don't know, _dialogue_ between here and there without a gate?"

"No gate that we know of," Robin said, breaking into the conversation. Steve stepped aside a little to make room for her.

"Will brought you and you," Nancy pointed to Jonathan and Steve, "out of being possessed. Why? His connection with the mind flayer?"

"A power stronger than this psycho hunting El?" Nancy asked.

Robin made a face. "Why wouldn't he just possess Joyce if he wanted El so bad? That would have been perfect. Who in the house would have noticed her sleepwalking right into El's room?"

"Maybe he couldn't?" Nancy supposed. "Maybe it's the same reason Joyce can feel Will? She's the same as him?"

"Mom was never possessed by the Mind Flayer," Jonathan pointed out.

Steve asked, "Could there be any other reason?"

"Why did he pick Mike?" Nancy asked, thinking about that moment before Mike shoved Eleven's head against the wall. "I was just as close to El as he was."

"Maybe he stupidly thought Mike would be stronger?" Steve asked.

Nancy shook her head. "Or maybe he couldn't reach me, either."

Pointing at Nancy, Robin asked, "What's something you, Joyce, and Will all have in common?"

"He didn't take you either," Jonathan pointed out. "Or Murray."

"We were both further away from El," Robin replied.

_Think, think, think_ , Nancy told herself, and then she saw Jonathan's expression as it changed. "You got it?"

"You've all been to the Upside Down," he said, looking up to meet Nancy's eyes. "You've all survived that place."

A shiver went down Nancy's spine at the thought. "So, what? You think we're immune?"

Jonathan turned his head suddenly, like he'd heard something.

"What?" Nancy asked him, watching as Jonathan took a step away from Joyce's room. "What is it?"

"I think Mom's right," Jonathan told her. "Will's close."

"Now _he's_ psychic?" Robin whispered to Steve.

Nancy remembered watching as the Christmas lights strung above the Byers' old living room lit up one after another, leading the way out the front door and toward town. She remembered Jonathan's whispered, "Mom?" At the time, she'd figured it was an educated guess. He'd known Hopper and Joyce were going into the Upside Down. Guessing the moving lights were because of them wasn't out of the realm of possibility. 

Now, Nancy wasn't so sure. Maybe Jonathan and Joyce were both _sensitive_ to Will and to each other in a way most people weren't. (In the back of her mind she wondered if _this_ was the reason Jonathan had refused to stay with Nancy. He refused to leave his mom and brother. Then she told herself that she was being unfair.)

Nancy closed her eyes, trying to listen, to hear Mike or any of the others, but there was nothing. Catching up with Jonathan, she asked him, "What can you hear? Are they okay?" Steve followed closely.

Turning back, Jonathan grabbed each of their hands. "Come on."


	9. The Upside Down

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To escape Nine, Eleven has to take some very drastic steps.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A little trigger warning for some non-graphic vomiting in this chapter.

The sideways step made El's stomach lurch, and then bodies fell on top of her, bruising her legs and side. El pushed at them, sure she was under attack, but they scrambled away on their own. 

When El opened her eyes, she was in a dark alcove, blue light filtering in through the open door. Something wriggled underneath her, and there were figures moving in front of her.

She got to her feet in a flash, pulling Will up with her. One of the other figures groaned, and it sounded familiar. "Where are we?"

"Oh, shit!" That was definitely Dustin's voice. "Oh, shit! Where are we?"

"S–sorry," El told them, shouldering her way out of the closet and pulling Will along with her.

"This is the Upside Down, isn't it?" That was Max.

"I didn't mean to bring you," El told them, her eyes starting to adjust to the dim light. "I didn't mean--"

"Are you guys back to normal?" Will asked, putting El behind his back, like he was going to protect her against all of the rest of them.

"What the fuck about this is normal?" Lucas asked. "Weren't we just at the hospital?"

"Do you remember what you were doing at the hospital?" Will asked him. 

Lucas looked over at Mike. "There was a fight. Mike went crazy. Then it was Jonathan."

"Then what?"

Shaking his head and looking over at Max, then at Dustin, Lucas said, "I don't know. I can't remember. We were running away from Jonathan and then…"

"Then we were here," Dustin finished for him. "You brought us here?"

"Wonder twin powers activate," Max said slowly, looking at El and Will with horror in her eyes.

"Sorry," El insisted, wiping a tear from below her eye.

"We didn't know what else to do," Will told them. "Nine was trying to use you to get to El. He couldn't reach us here."

A far-off noise made Will stiffen and squeeze El's hand tighter. El shivered. She rubbed the aching side of her head, and her fingers came back darker.

She showed the others. "Blood."

"Oh, shit. Oh, shit," Dustin whispered, looking to Will. "Is that what I think it was?"

"We have to run," Will told them, leading the way back through the parts of the hospital they'd already seen in the Rightside Up. 

Except here, everything was a little different. Instead of people, there were black, slimy vines trailing along the walls and floor. The air was cold and damp and full of wafting, flaky spores. And in the distance, something bigger was coming.

"Does the mind flayer know we're here?" she asked Will as they ran.

"Not yet," Will told her, leading the way into the wing of the hospital where Joyce had been sleeping. He slowed outside her room, turning around in place. "Jonathan?"

The monster howl came again, this time a little closer than before.

"Can you get us back out?" Mike asked as he caught up. "Can you get us back home?"

"Wait," Max said before El could nod. "What's to say that we won't go right back to attacking you when we get back there? I don't want to hurt you."

"Do we have to go back _with_ you?" Dustin asked. "If you could push us back somewhere, then go somewhere else before you return, we won't know where you are. Nine won't be able to use us to find you, right?"

El thought about both times Nine had sent people after her. The first was in the car. She'd slipped Inbetween to visit Mike. The second was in the waiting room. She'd just wanted to know if Hopper was still alive. She'd just wanted a short visit.

"I don't think he can find me unless I go Inbetween," she told the others.

"Let's do it, then," Mike said. He pulled Eleven into his arms and kissed her hair. "Be careful?"

"You, too," she told him.

Holding onto Will, El could catch glimpses of the real world beyond, just at the corners of her eyes. The corner of Joyce's room was empty enough.

"Get closer together," she told the others, watching as they all bunched up, holding each other.

Blinking a tear out of her eye, El held up her hand and _pushed_. The others vanished, and Will tugged her hand.

"Can you run?"

El nodded.

Out in the hallway, Will cried, "Jonathan! We need you at the school!"

A distorted, "Come on," filled the air around them, but it was clearly in Jonathan's voice.

El met Will's eyes and she knew they were on the same page about what needed to be done.

"Which way is school?" she asked as they left the hospital.

"This way," Will assured her, darting from one area of cover to the next. "It's not very far. Just on the eastern side of downtown."

El nodded, and followed Will when he moved again.

~*~

Steve followed Jonathan and Nancy through the hospital, not quite sure what the plan was, but willing to trust them just the same. His face ached, but he figured it was nothing particularly new. He could push past it. 

As they ran past a hallway near the waiting room, Steve saw a familiar face. It was Brad, the new guy at work! Steve almost waved to him, but then he realized Brad was wearing hospital scrubs. What reputable hospital let a high school senior work the graveyard shift?

Unless Brad had lied to the hospital and told them he was older than he looked. Then Steve got the sinking suspicion that Brad had much more likely lied to _him_ about being younger than he looked. _That motherfucker_! But why?

Robin caught up to them as the three of them hit the parking lot, heading for Steve’s car. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know,” he told her, but he got his keys out of his pocket and unlocked the car. Robin took the seat behind him, while Jonathan waved Nancy into the backseat and took shotgun himself. Starting the engine, Steve asked, “Where are we going?”

Jonathan pointed left out of the parking lot. “That way.”

Coming up to the intersection outside the hospital, Steve asked, “Should I run the red?”

“No!” cried all three of the others. 

“Jesus Christ, okay!” Steve stopped at the light, drumming his fingers against the steering wheel. “I recognized a guy back there.”

“At the hospital?” Jonathan asked him. 

“Yeah. He’s the new guy at work, but he was dressed like a hospital worker. Something about it doesn’t feel right.”

“How new?” Robin asked him. The light turned green and Steve made sure to look both ways quickly before pulling through it. 

“He started a few days ago,” Steve told her, keeping an eye out for anyone following them. 

“When, _exactly_?” Nancy asked. 

“You don’t think it’s a coincidence?” Robin asked her. 

Catching Steve’s eyes in the rear view mirror as they passed a car heading the opposite direction, Nancy said, “No.”

“It was…” Steve tried to think. “Thursday, I think. Big Dan had just put up the Thanksgiving decorations.”

“Are we thinking he’s a spy?” Jonathan asked, turning to face the girls in the back. “Someone the CIA sent here to keep an eye on us? On Eleven?”

“I don’t think they’d…” Robin said, trailing off and frowning out the window. 

Nancy asked Steve, “How soon did he show up after El got her powers back?”

“Like, a week or two later, probably,” Steve told them. “But she was resting them most of that time. Trying not to burn out again. Why?”

“El said he found her in the dark place. Inbetween, she called it,” Nancy explained. “What if he’s been looking for her since this summer? Or maybe even longer?”

“Since the Russians?” Robin asked.

“They found out about the gate and the demogorgon,” Nancy pointed out. “What’s to say they haven’t found out about El, too? That they haven't been looking for her?”

“This Nine guy, he’s from the Hawkins lab?” Steve asked, making a turn when Jonathan tapped his wrist and pointed. 

Nancy said, “That’s what El implied.”

“Can’t he just be working on his own? Why would you think he’s got anything to do with them?” Sighing, Steve added, "I mean, El said that Kali girl she met was working on her own agenda."

“I–“ Nancy sat back in her seat. “That’s a good point.”

Steve rolled his eyes. He knew Nancy loved him, but he was a little tired of being thought of as “the dumb one,” even by her.

"What do we think he wants with her?" Jonathan asked the others, directing Steve to make another turn, right into the high school driveway.

"She's a pretty effective weapon," Nancy pointed out, tapping Jonathan's shoulder. "Like at the cabin?"

"Yeah, but all that shit almost killed her," Jonathan replied. Then he told Steve, "Just pull up to the front. I have a feeling we're going to have to wait."

"She was up against a super monster from the Upside Down," Nancy argued. "If Nine can figure out how to control her the way he controlled you guys, he'd be damn near unstoppable."

"If he can control people, why isn't he already unstoppable?" Robin asked the others. "He could just tell soldiers to shoot each other. He could tell bank tellers to turn over all their money."

"I bet he's got limits," Steve told her, pulling up to the school and putting the car in park. "He had to get me while I was sleeping."

"Me too," Jonathan told the others. They all got out of the car, reconvening at the back. "The last thing I remember was getting sleepy."

"Mike was sleeping the first time Nine got him," Nancy told the others. "But not the second."

"There's got to be limits, though, right?" Robin asked the others, popping the back hatch and sitting down. "Either the number of people he can control at once, or…"

"Or distance," Nancy said, pushing at Steve until he was sitting next to Robin. "When someone was too far for her to find without it, El needed a sensory deprivation tank to boost her signal, or whatever you want to call it."

"You've been spending too much time with the radio nerds," Steve told Nancy, but he let her tilt his face up into the light illuminating the front of the school. 

"How does this keep happening to you?" she asked with a tut. 

Smiling up at Nancy, he asked, "Kiss and make it better?"

Nancy indulged him with a kiss before moving aside to let Jonathan take a look. He ran his thumbs back over Steve's cheeks, whispering, "God, I'm sorry, baby." 

"Not your fault," Steve insisted, letting Jonathan kiss him too. Looking around at the others, Steve asked, "So, do we have a plan or what?"

"Not really," Nancy said with a sigh, leaning against Jonathan when he wrapped his arms around her. "So far all we have is the Upside Down theory, and I'm not sure how we're going to test _that_."

"When El and the others get back, we'll ask them," Jonathan said, looking around like he was expecting to see them any second.

Hell, he probably was. Steve thought the odds on the kids making it back at all were pretty damn slim. After all, it was only a theory that El could push things to the Upside Down with Will's help. What if, once they were there, they couldn't get back? He didn't say this doubt out loud, but when he met Robin's eyes, Steve knew he wasn't the only one thinking things looked grim.

~*~

El held her breath and pressed as close to Will as she could, both of them holding as still as possible. The school was close. Just a few blocks away. The problem was the _thing_ stalking in the space between. It's movements were disjointed, swift, and terribly _familiar_. El knew this sort of beast.

Demogorgon.

It wasn't one of the babies. Those had been dangerous, but easy to kill. They had necks she could snap, bones she could break, and the life would go out of them. Even Hopper's gun worked against them. The adult demogorgon, on the other hand, was almost impervious. And it had _powers_ , not unlike El's. It could move things with its mind. If there was one gate open, it could tear new portals to the Rightside Up nearby. 

She couldn't face it. Not now. Not while she was tired and still getting used to having her powers again. Like Will said, if she lost her powers completely, there was no way they'd be able to find Hopper. There was no way they'd be able to save him.

His whisper just barely audible, Will asked, "Do it here?"

El looked over at him and nodded. It was going to have to be here. They hadn't made it all the way to the school, but they'd made it far enough away from the hospital. Here would have to do.

Clearing her mind, El tried to see past the divide between the two places. It had been easier at the hospital, where there were lights on. Here, the light from the Rightside Up was dim, hardly any light at all. There was a streetlamp down the block a bit, and El found that if she squinted at it, she could kind of see it take on a warmer, more orange hue.

That was it. 

There it was.

El _pulled_ Will with her toward that light, taking that sideways step. Her first few breaths of air after shifting were so clear and pure, they almost hurt.

"Oh, thank god," Will said, hugging El tightly. "We made it. You did it."

El swayed on her feet, the street around her going darker. For a second she thought she might be slipping back into the Upside Down. 

But then Will lowered her to the ground and said, "Hey, put your head between your knees. Don't pass out on me!"

She did as he asked and the dark, swimming feeling faded. "Thanks," she said.

"Anytime," Will replied, standing up and pacing around a bit. "Can you walk? I don't know what we're going to do if Jonathan didn't hear me. Where are we going to hide?"

"I can walk," El told him, pulling herself up to her feet and catching his hand. "It'll be okay."

Looking over at her, Will gave a little laugh. "Yeah. Yeah, you're right. It'll be okay."

"Let's go."

El felt tired from her toes all the way up to her hair, but walking was something she could still do. Compared to everything else she'd done that day, walking was easy. 

Before long, they reached the school driveway. And not long after that, El noticed Steve's car, sitting right in front of the school. 

"What will we do if they turn against us again?" Will asked her. "What if Nine followed them? What if he has Jonathan?"

"It'll be okay," El assured him, even though she didn't know that to be true. Right now she just _needed_ her big brothers. If all else failed, she would put herself into the Upside Down alone. She was the one Nine wanted. She was the one he was after. If she took herself out of the equation, at least she would be sparing them.

It was Jonathan who saw them first, stepping out from behind the car. He called out, saying, "There you are!"

"You got my message," Will called back, and his fears seemed to fade away. He hurried toward Jonathan, wrapping him in a big hug. "I knew you'd hear me."

"I don't know how," Jonathan told him, letting go of Will and holding his arms out for El, "but I did." 

El let herself sag into Jonathan's arms, holding onto him. "I'm so tired."

"Where are the others?" Jonathan asked her, picking her up and bringing her over to the car. "Mike? Lucas? Max? Dustin?"

"We sent them back at the hospital," Will said, wrapped up in Steve's arms. Robin made space in the back of Steve's car for Jonathan to set El down.

"How long were they in the Upside Down?" Nancy asked, pulling a blanket from the back seat over El's shoulders.

"Couple minutes," El told her, pulling the blanket closer around her. It was almost as cold here as in the Upside Down. Winter was _not_ her favorite season.

"Yeah, not long," Will told them, letting Steve hug El too. "We were hoping that some distance would help us lose Nine."

Crouching down in front of her, Steve said, "Hey, El? I've got a question."

She nodded at him.

"Did you see Nine? Inbetween, you saw him?"

El nodded again.

"What did he look like?"

Closing her eyes, El tried to picture him. Her brain wanted to go Inbetween to find him, but she wouldn't let herself do that. It would just give away her position again. So El opened her eyes and looked up as she thought instead. "Light hair," she told Steve. "Pale skin. Dark eyes."

"Kinda pointy face?" He asked. "Can't really tell how old he is?"

How did he know that? Frowning at Steve, El nodded. "You saw him?"

"I think I _know_ him. He was at the hospital."

"Mom is still there," Will said, giving Jonathan a significant look. 

"I can go check on her," Nancy told the others. "Test the theory that Nine won’t be able to control me.”

“Why won’t he be able to?” Will asked, looking around at the others. 

“He hasn’t taken anyone who’s been to the Upside Down,” Nancy replied. “Joyce. Will. Me.”

“I…” El started to say, but something about the theory sounded right to her. “I don’t think he can see Will. He called me alone when I wasn’t.”

“Is that because of the Upside Down, or because of the Mind Flayer?” Will asked, and El wasn’t sure what to tell him.

She shrugged.

“We can’t risk El getting taken,” Jonathan said to Nancy. “I think you should take El and Will somewhere. Don’t tell us where. Just drive. When she’s rested and ready, we’ll meet back up.”

“What if Nine uses you to hurt someone?” Nancy asked him. “Like your mom?”

At the thought of someone hurting Joyce, El got angry. Joyce was the closest thing she’d ever had to a real mother. Nine wasn’t going to hurt her or take her away. 

Waving Will closer, El waited until she could snatch his wrist. The others were close enough it was going to have to do. 

El pulled them all over a step, the Upside Down blinking into terrible view. 

“Whoa!” Steve cried, getting control of himself when Will hissed and put a finger over his lips. 

The demogorgon was still close. El could feel it. She could also feel her way back to the Rightside Up. It was easier this time. The school was more familiar ground, as was Steve’s car. 

“Be careful,” Will told her, but the monster was getting closer. 

It was going to have to be now. The others popped back across the step when she pushed them, but El couldn’t quite manage to get Will and herself back there. 

“El!” Will hissed at her. “What's wrong? Can’t you find it?”

She shook her head. The monster was so close. It was going to find them. It was going to get them!

“Remember the first day of class? Here at the school?” he asked, his voice shaking. “Remember how it feels to walk through those doors every day. El? Remember… Remember Hopper needs you! Remember Mike?”

That did it. El grabbed onto that thread in her mind and _pulled_. She breathed just long enough to know that they’d made it before things went dark again. She felt herself falling.

~*~

As soon as they flickered back into the real world, Jonathan felt his stomach turn over. He barely made it to the planters beside the front doors of the school before he blew chunks. The Upside Down was so much worse than Jonathan had ever imagined. How had Will managed to survive that place for a whole _week_?

It was Steve’s hand rubbing Jonathan’s back a second later. “You alright, babe?”

Spitting out the rest of the sick taste, Jonathan nodded. “Yeah. I’ll be okay.”

He stood up and turned back toward the others. “Where are Will and El?”

“We don’t know,” Steve told him. “They didn’t come back with us.”

Suddenly dizzy at the thought that maybe they were truly lost this time, Jonathan crouched down. “Why the hell did she do that? She was getting so weak!”

Steve followed him down, wrapping his arms around Jonathan. “She never does know when to quit.”

Between one blink and the next, El and Will came back, reappearing a few feet away from where they’d disappeared. El toppled, only Will’s grip on her arm saving her from cracking her head on the pavement.

He watched as Will turned over El’s care to Nancy and Robin, and then ducked into the back seat of Steve’s car. He came back out with a radio, flipping it on and pulling out the antenna. “Dustin! Dustin, do you copy? It’s Will. Over.”

There was no response. Pressing his lips together, Will sat in the back of the car. “Dustin, this is a code red emergency. Please respond, over.”

Jonathan let Steve help him back up to his feet. God, Will didn’t even look phased. Jonathan wondered if he’d spent so long in that place that maybe he’d become part of it. Or it had become part of him. Either way, Jonathan understood now better than he ever had before why his brother had come home changed. 

The radio in Will’s hands crackled to life. “This is Dustin. I read you loud and clear. Over.”

“Dustin!” Will smiled, looking up at the others proudly. “What’s the situation there? Over.”

“We had to lock the old guy in the bathroom,” Dustin said. “But he calmed down awhile ago. No more disturbances here. What’s going on at your end? Over.”

Will replied, “Our mage is tapped out. No more spell slots. We need a long rest. Over.”

“What’s our rendezvous point? Over.”

Looking around at the others, Jonathan said, “We can’t stay at the hospital. There are too many people.”

“Too many potential puppets,” Robin said in agreement. 

“We have two cars. Should we split up?” Steve asked. 

Will shook his head. “Splitting the party is always a bad idea.”

“Even when a mini mind flayer is after you?” Jonathan asked him.

Will bit his lip, then pressed the button on his radio. “Rendezvous at the Griswold vehicle. Battle plan to follow. Over.”

“Steve,” Nancy said, waving him over to El and having him pick her up. “Let’s put her in the back.”

“Yeah, okay,” Steve said, carefully placing El in the back of his hatchback. Jonathan felt doubly grateful that they hadn’t brought his car, with its tomb of a trunk. 

Still feeling sick, Jonathan stumbled over to the passenger seat, claiming it when he sat down. 

Once everyone was in and they were back on the road, Will quietly said, “I think I’ve done that before.”

“Done what?” Jonathan asked him, ignoring his sick stomach and turning in his seat to look back at Will. 

“Stepped sideways like that. Into the Upside Down.”

Jonathan didn’t understand what he was talking about. Hadn’t he and El made the journey twice in a short amount of time? Unless… “You mean before today?”

Will nodded. “For awhile, when the gate was still open, seeing into the Upside Down was easy. Like blinking. Sometimes I thought I was stuck halfway between the two places.”

“Was it too hard on you?” Nancy asked him, putting her hand on his arm. “Going back today?”

“No, it’s not that,” Will told her, looking down at his hands. “I’m talking about the first time I went there. I actually physically stepped through, and then I got lost.”

Nancy looked up at Jonathan, and they shared a look before she said to Will, “I thought the demogorgon pulled you through.”

“It tried,” he told her. “But I was so scared, and I wanted to be able to get away so badly. Everything just sort of _flipped_ and I was there. The demogorgon was still halfway in the Rightside Up. It was kind of stuck in the portal it made. So I ran away. I ran and I hid, and it didn’t find me for a very, very long time.”

“You think you’re like El?” Steve asked, and Jonathan didn't know how he'd made that connection, but now that he'd said it out loud, it made sense.

Nodding, Will replied, “A little bit, anyway. Not powerful, like her.”

“Hey,” Jonathan said, reaching back and grabbing Will’s hands in his. “You’re still my brother, okay? Nothing changes that.”

“I know,” Will said, nodding. “I know.”

They pulled up to the hospital then, stopping in the parking lot next to Nancy’s station wagon. Dustin and Mike helped Steve move El into the back of Nancy’s car. While they were doing that, Jonathan pulled Nancy aside. “Do you think you could find that motel outside of Chicago? The one we stayed in last year?”

Nancy looked up and sucked air through her teeth for a moment before whispering to him, “It was right where 94 met 41, right? South of the interstate. Roadside Inn or something like that?”

“Yeah,” Jonathan confirmed. “Don’t tell the others, but we’re going to meet up there.”

“What if something happens to either one of us?” Nancy asked.

“Then they’ll figure something else out,” he told her. “But we need to get El as far away from here as we can. But I can’t leave my mom here in the hospital alone, Nance. I need you to–“

She put a finger over his lips and gave him a kind smile. “I’ve got it handled, Jonathan. Just be safe? For me?”

“I will,” he promised. “You too?”

“I will.” Nancy pulled Jonathan close and hugged him.

God, Jonathan didn’t want to let go. He didn’t want to do it, but he had to.


	10. The Killing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A road trip proves deadly.

The drive north was tense, even after the sun rose. At least Nancy didn’t have to worry about Murray in the seat next to hers. He’d had her drop him off at his car, given her a telephone number so she could play him the next recording, and then left. She couldn't blame him for being spooked after falling under Nine's control like he had. It had to be extremely disconcerting to anyone.

Nancy left Robin with Steve and Jonathan, taking Will in her place. Eleven woke up when they stopped to drop off Murray, and the kids had decided to reorganize themselves. Dustin ended up sitting shotgun next to Nancy. Mike and Will sat in the middle seat with El between them. Lucas and Max took the back. 

Everyone except Nancy and Dustin fell asleep. She hoped like hell they were far enough away from Nine that the kids didn't have to fear being asleep. They looked like they needed it. “Are you sure you don’t want to take a nap?” Nancy asked Dustin when they stopped for gas an hour into the trip.

“Nah, I’m okay,” he told her. “I kind of have a phobia about being in a car when the driver falls asleep and kills us all, so…”

“Ah,” she said, pulling the nozzle out of her car and going inside to pay for the gas. 

The cashier nodded out to Nancy’s car, asking, “Church group field trip?"

“Something like that,” she replied with a polite smile. 

Back on the road, Nancy tried not to think too much about having been back to the Upside Down the night before. Her memories of the place had been full of terror for the past two years. Last night’s experience hadn’t been any different. 

And then to learn that maybe Will had this ability, whatever El was piggybacking off of, _before_ he’d been to the Upside Down in the first place, boggled Nancy’s mind. 

She’d known Will since he and Mike became friends in kindergarten, and she was in third grade. People had always said Will was weird and strange, but people said that about Jonathan, too. Nancy had always just thought they were pretty normal. 

What if they weren’t? 

What if, just like being able to hear each other across the membrane dividing this world from the next, Jonathan shared this ability with Will too? What if the only reason Nancy had made it back from the Upside Down was because Jonathan could hear her, and make her hear him? If she’d gone into the woods that day with anyone else, would she have died there, just like Barb?

“Penny for your thoughts,” Dustin said, giving Nancy a careful smile from the other seat. 

She wanted to talk about something, anything _normal_. For just a few minutes. So, Nancy asked, “When was the last time you talked to Suzie?”

“A few weeks ago,” he told her with a soft smile. “I’ve been sending letters to her cousin, who passes them along for me in a secure manner.”

Imagining what a relationship based on secret letters would look like, Nancy said, “That’s got to be difficult.”

“It is,” Dustin said simply. “But she’s worth it.”

Looking in the rear view mirror, at Jonathan’s little brother and his adopted sister, sitting right next to her own brother, Nancy decided that, yeah. It was worth it. This family of theirs was worth it, for as long as they could hold it together. 

She thought again about how Steve had referred to Joyce at the hospital as, “Mom,” and about how much she wanted to be part of that too.

The wait, being separated from Steve and Jonathan, was excruciatingly difficult. But they were worth it.

And if they survived long enough, the separation would be over eventually.

~*~

Steve sat in a chair at Joyce’s bedside, his fingers tangled with Jonathan’s where their hands hung between them. The sun had come up already, shining through the window and right into his eyes. He shifted a little, trying to get out of the worst of the sunlight, but he quickly came to the realization that he’d have to move his chair to really get out of the light. He didn’t want to move. He wanted to stay right here next to Jonathan, where he belonged. 

Joyce stirred, waking up and blinking before she looked over at them. Glancing over at Jonathan, Steve realized that sometime during the past five minutes, he’d fallen asleep. Steve kept half his attention on Jonathan, just in case Nine was going to try something funny. Turning back to Joyce, he gave her a little wave to wish her good morning. She waved back. 

“Where’s Will?” she asked in a whisper. 

“With Nancy,” Steve told her. “She’s got El and the rest of the kids. Taking them somewhere safe.”

Joyce nodded. 

A soft whistle from Robin at the door told Steve to let go of Jonathan’s hand. As soon as he did, a doctor came into the room. He smiled at Joyce, saying, “Oh, good! You’re awake.”

Jonathan snorted softly as he woke up, startled and eyes wide. Steve put a hand on his shoulder, letting him know everything was fine. Jonathan nodded, and although he didn’t want to, Steve took his hand back off Jonathan. 

“We’re ready to release you,” the doctor said, “as long as you’ve got someone responsible to take care of you at home.” He cut his eyes over at Steve and Jonathan. 

“Oh, these are my adult sons,” Joyce told the doctor, and it warmed Steve’s heart to hear her call him her son. “They’re very responsible.”

The doctor gave them instructions, and then Joyce and Jonathan both signed some papers and they were free to go. An orderly wheeled Joyce to the parking lot while Steve ran ahead and pulled his car up to the door. 

As they got on the road, Steve asked Jonathan, “Are we stopping at home at all?”

Jonathan shook his head. “Still too dangerous. We’re heading somewhere else.” He directed Steve onto a highway heading north. 

“Explain to me what happened,” Joyce said. “What exactly is going on?”

“El got her powers back,” Jonathan told her, before reciting everything that had happened the night before. Steve and Robin filled in some of the gaps. 

“We always figured there had to be others,” Joyce said with a sigh. “It’s a shame he wants to hurt people.”

“After what they did in that lab,” Jonathan said, “it’s a wonder El didn’t turn out like that too.”

Joyce hummed in agreement, covering her eyes. Steve reached over and popped open the glove compartment, taking out the sunglasses he had there and giving them to Joyce. “Here, wear these,” he told her, his eyes still on the road. 

“Thank you, Steve,” she said. 

Glancing at Jonathan, Steve wondered if anyone was going to mention Hopper. Instead, Robin said, “I think someone is following us.”

“Shit, really?” Steve asked, looking in his mirrors. “Which car?”

“That dark red sedan back there,” she said. “It’s been keeping one car between us for miles.”

“Yeah, I see it. What do you think we should do?”

“We can’t lead Nine back to Eleven,” Joyce said, some of that familiar steel back in her voice. “That has to be what he's hoping for, right? We have to lose him somehow.”

"How do we do that?" Steve asked, noticing as they passed an exit. "Are we looking for a place with a lot of people, or do we want to get him away from people?"

"We don't want him using people as puppets against us," Robin told them.

Jonathan sighed. "Yeah, but if Nancy's theory is wrong, and he can still control _us_ , wouldn't it be better to go somewhere with a lot of people?"

"When has betting against Nancy ever worked out?" Steve asked him, meeting Jonathan's eyes for a second before turning his back to the road ahead of them.

Jonathan nodded. "Let's bet that she's right."

"Someplace deserted it is," Steve said. A few minutes later, there was another exit. The signs before the exit showed one gas station, but nothing else. He took the exit. "What's the plan?"

"Pull over someplace empty. Like a field," Robin told him. 

Steve stopped at the end of the exit and turned in the opposite direction from the gas station. It wasn't long before they were on a country road, between two frost-covered fields. "This deserted enough for you?"

"He's still following us," Jonathan told the others. "What if he's got a gun or something?"

" _Now_ you think of this?" Steve complained, still driving. Eventually, he saw a place he thought might be promising. He sped up, driving as fast as he dared on the straight but narrow road, and putting some distance between his car and the one following them. He slowed down just long enough to make a right turn at the next intersection. 

Then he sped up again, racing toward the abandoned-looking barn a quarter-mile down the road. Steve pulled behind it, saying, "Jonathan, out. Robin, come drive."

"Where am I driving?" Robin asked, racing around the car and taking Steve's spot in the still-running car. 

"Go the long way around the barn. Don't let him see you," Steve told her. "Drive back the way we came. Wait, I don't know, maybe ten minutes? Then come back for us."

"What are you going to do, boys?" Joyce called from the other side of the car. 

"Don't worry about it, Mom," Steve told her, closing Robin's door and waving them forward.

Steve ran back toward the road, Jonathan close on his heels. "What's your plan?"

He gave Jonathan a desperate look.

Rolling his eyes, Jonathan said, "You don't have a plan, do you?"

"Hey, I'm not the brains of this operation," Steve insisted, reaching over and squeezing Jonathan's hand. "I'm just the pretty face."

Jonathan squeezed Steve's hand in return. The red car approached quickly, and that's when Jonathan dropped Steve's hand, saying, "Right now the only plan I've got is to punch him in the kidneys and steal his car."

"Works for me," Steve said, watching as the car slowed down, stopping a dozen yards away. 

The figure who stepped out of the car was exactly the one Steve had expected. "Hey, Brad. How's it going?"

"Steve," Brad called back, closing the car door and putting his keys in his right pants pocket. "I take it this is one of your brothers?"

"Sure," Steve replied. 

Brad took a few steps closer to them, tilting his head. "What have you done to yourselves?" He took another step before stopping. "Unless Eleven has somehow done this to you?"

Steve laughed. "Got yourself into a bit of a bind, haven't you? You can't control us. This is two against one."

Grinning, Brad said, "Sorry, Steve. It's actually _none_ against one." 

Before Steve could ask what the hell he meant by that, Brad snapped his fingers and everything went dark.

~*~

El woke up in the car as it pulled into a parking lot. Her head was on Mike's shoulder, but her hand was in Will's. She could tell that Mike didn't like her holding Will's hand so much, but she didn't know how to explain how much _safer_ she felt with an exit plan in her hands. Even if it meant going back to the Upside Down, having that option felt safer.

"Wait here," Nancy told the others, getting out of the car and going into the building.

"How are you feeling?" Mike asked her.

El rolled her shoulder and neck muscles, and then reached for the part of her brain where her powers lived. She tipped Dustin's hat up and off his head, catching it before it fell in Will's lap. There was no pain, so El smiled as she handed Dustin's hat back to him. "Better."

"Good," Mike said with a heavy sigh. "Good."

"So, the plan is just to sit here and wait?" Max asked from behind El. "And hope that we've, what? Put enough distance between that asshole and us?"

"What are you thinking?" Lucas asked her.

Max answered, "I'm thinking we need to get another recording for Murray, or we're never going to find Hopper."

"I can't go Inbetween for another recording," El insisted. "Not while Nine is hunting me."

"Do you guys think," Will asked, looking around at the others, "That Dr. Owens might be able to tell us more about Nine? Answer some questions about what he can do?"

"Maybe," Mike answered him, "but how are we supposed to get in touch with him? Do you have his number?"

"I have _a_ number," Will admitted.

"Wait, how do we know it wasn't Dr. Owens who sent Nine?" Lucas asked.

Will shook his head. "After everything he did to help my mom adopt El? That doesn't make sense."

"Enough," El said, frowning at the others. "Hide first, gather information second. We're not stupid."

"No, we're not," Mike agreed, looking around at the other. "We're not stupid."

Turning in her seat, El told Max, "Hopper needs us, but he needs us not to be stupid _first_."

Max nodded. She understood.

Nancy came back to the car, knocking on Mike's window and waving them out into the sunny, if cold, midday air. "Come on."

They all got out of the car and piled into the two adjoining rooms Nancy had rented. "I hope we don't have to stay more than one night," she said when she closed the door behind her, "because I'm running out of cash."

"That's what we get for leaving all the adults behind," Dustin muttered.

El couldn't help but think that this was all her fault. Again. The people around her all got hurt or killed. She had to protect them, but what if the best way to protect them was to get as far away from them as possible?

Nancy laid a hand on El's shoulder, and waiting until El looked at her before she spoke. "Whatever thoughts you're having right now? No."

Confused, El asked her, "No?"

Nancy nodded sharply. "No. All of us are waiting here for _your_ mom and _your_ big brothers. Then we'll make a plan."

"What if they don't make it here?" Mike asked her, speaking softly enough that only Nancy and El heard him.

Frowning at him, Nancy said, "We can't think like that. What we _can_ do is brainstorm. Think of as many different plans as possible. Once we have more information, we can choose the best one."

"Brainstorm," El repeated, thinking it was a scary word for such a useful activity. "Yes. Brainstorm."

~*~

"It's actually _none_ against one," Nine said to Steve before snapping his fingers.

Beside Jonathan, Steve collapsed, sprawling sideways in the dirt. 

Jonathan went from horrified to terrified to enraged in less than a second. As he sprinted toward Nine, all he could think was that if Steve was dead, so was Nine.

Nine seemed surprised to see Jonathan still standing, much less running at him. He backed up a step and snapped his fingers again, but although Jonathan's legs felt a little heavier, he didn't fall.

"What–" Nine started to ask before Jonathan's fist hit the side of his face.

Nine's head whipped sideways and he stumbled back, hitting the backs of his legs on his car behind him.

Jonathan grabbed Nine by the shoulder and hit him again. A bone cracked and Jonathan didn't know if it was his hand or Nine's face that had broken. It didn't matter.

He threw Nine face down onto the ground, following him and getting his arm around Nine's throat. He put his knee in Nine’s back and _pulled_. To the side, Nine made some sort of gesture before snapping his fingers again. A weariness spread through Jonathan's body, but he pushed past it and tightened his hold.

"That might have worked," Jonathan hissed in Nine's ear, "except I've spent the last two years learning how to function without sleep. You picked the wrong family to mess with."

Maybe he was imagining things, but for a second, Jonathan thought he could feel Nine's fear. "Oh, _now_ you're afraid? You thought _we_ were the cornered animals? Fish in a barrel? No, motherfucker, that's you. _We've_ saved the world three times. _We've_ gotten used to dealing with loss and moving on, fighting anyway. You thought _you_ were the monster?" 

Jonathan scoffed.

"My sister is the monster that monsters fear. And do you know what that makes me?"

Nine grasped at Jonathan's arm, his fingernails scratching across the tough denim of his jacket. His legs pushed at the dirt, trying to knock Jonathan off him. He didn't get anywhere, his body weak and likely unused to doing manual labor.

Sweat pearling at the edge of his brow and cooling rapidly in the dry November air, Jonathan said, "That makes me her big brother. I'm the person responsible for protecting her when she can't protect herself."

"Eleven," Nine gasped, his voice thready and choked off by Jonathan's arm. " _My_ sister."

"What? Because you both spent time being abused by the same people? That doesn't make a family."

" _Blood_."

Jonathan strained, tightening his hold on Nine's neck. Lonnie's face flitted through the back of his mind. "Blood doesn't mean shit, asshole."

Nine went limp under him, but Jonathan knew better than to let go. His arms ached and started to tremble, but Jonathan didn't let go.

In the dirt behind him, Steve began to stir, groaning softly. 

Jonathan still didn't let go.

Steve got to his feet and shuffled over. "Are you killing him?"

"You think I shouldn't?" Jonathan asked, looking up at Steve.

He crouched down beside Jonathan and ducked to look at Nine. "He might be dead already."

"What if he isn't?" Jonathan asked, starting to shake with the effort of holding on so tightly. "I thought he'd killed you."

"I'm okay, baby," Steve said, putting a hand on Jonathan's shoulder. "You can let go. It's okay. You can let go."

Letting out a breath he'd been holding, Joanthan loosened his hold on Nine. He shuffled backward, collapsing back into the dirt, his arms screaming at him. "Check if he's still got a pulse."

Steve grimaced, but he placed a hand on Nine's back. "I don't know. Not that I can feel."

The sound of tires on the dirt road grabbed Jonathan's attention. Stupidly he thought it was going to be the police, there to arrest him. He'd taken a life.

Holy shit, he'd _taken a life_.

Jonathan got to his feet and staggered over toward the ditch on the side of the road before heaving. His stomach was pretty much empty already, but the bile made his throat burn.

It was Steve's car that came up the road then, pulling in behind Nine's car, Robin at the wheel. Jonathan sighed, letting Steve help him to his feet as Robin and Joyce both got out of the car.

"What happened?" Robin asked, running toward them. "Is that him?"

"He attacked us," Jonathan said. "I didn't have a choice." He wished he believed the words as he said them.

"Is he dead?" Joyce asked, reaching for Jonathan.

Steve shrugged. "I think so. I couldn't tell."

"Shouldn't we make sure?" Robin said, looking at the others before realizing she was the closest one to the body. "Ah, fuck. One of you is buying me a drink after this."

She got closer to Nine's body and used her foot to turn him over. His eyes were open and bloodshot, and the sight made Jonathan dry heave this time. He turned away from the others, spitting into the dirt and putting his head down to help the nauseated feeling go away.

"Yeah, yep. He's dead," Robin announced. "Should we do something with the body, do you think?"

"And get our fingerprints on the evidence?" Joyce asked. "Are you crazy?"

Raising one eyebrow, Robin asked, "So we just leave him here?" 

Joyce frowned down at the body. "He threatened my children. If it were up to me, he'd suffer worse than a quick death and a corpse left to rot in the sun."

Beside him, Jonathan saw Steve shiver. 

"Let's go," Jonathan told the others. "We still have a long way to travel today."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, I'm pretty sure some of Jonathan's lines in this chapter were, let's say, an homage to some of Giles' lines in Buffy.


	11. The Singer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As El searches again for her dad, she makes a startling discovery.

Nancy sat at the window, watching the parking lot as the sun began to fade in the sky. What if Jonathan forgot how to get here? What if she remembered the wrong place? There was no back up plan. No way to get in touch if they needed to. 

What if something had happened to them? This was so stupid! How many times had Mike’s friends said not to split the party?

Eventually, a familiar set of headlights pulled into the parking lot. Nancy waited, holding her breath, just until she saw all four of them, and no one else, get out of the car. Then she opened the motel room door and ran out toward them. The first one to catch her in his arms was Jonathan. 

“Nance,” he said, burying his nose in her neck and breathing deeply. He only ever did that when it had been a bad day. She supposed everything that had happened the night before was pretty bad. Still, this seemed newer. Fresher. 

“What happened?” She asked as Robin put a hand on her shoulder and headed back toward the room the kids were spilling out of. 

“I killed him,” Jonathan told her, his voice trembling. 

“Who?”

“Nine,” Steve answered for him. He gave Nancy a short hug. “Let’s get this party inside.” Nancy noticed the odd way he didn’t look at Jonathan once as he passed.

Nancy watched Steve follow Robin, still not looking back, before she accepted a hug from Joyce. “He’s dead? It’s over?”

“You wanted there to be something else?” Joyce asked, to which Nancy shook her head. 

Joyce gave Jonathan a worried look, but Nancy told her, “It’s okay. I’ve got him.”

Nancy thought Joyce must have been extremely weary, or in a lot of pain, to have let Nancy take over the way she did. As it was, Joyce let Will and El give her hugs before helping her over to the room. 

Nancy caught Jonathan by the hand, reeling him in for another hug. “What happened, Jonathan?” she asked him softly.

“You were right about the Upside Down. He couldn’t control us anymore, I don’t think,” Jonathan told her. “But he snapped his fingers and Steve…” He shook his head, leaning back against Steve’s car and sitting up on the hood. “Steve hit the dirt. I thought he might have been _dead_.” 

Nancy’s heart clenched at the thought. Steve couldn’t die. She _needed_ him. She needed them both.

Jonathan finished telling her about Nine’s powers being ineffective against him for whatever unknown reason, and then about strangling Nine.

“I was just trying to protect everyone,” Jonathan said, brushing a tear off his face. “And the whole way here, Steve has been...I don’t know. I can't quite put a finger on it, but it's like he's looking at me _differently_.”

"That must have been really scary for him," Nancy said, kissing Jonathan's cheeks. “It’ll be okay. He’ll come around in a day or two.”

Jonathan nodded. “Yeah. I’m sure you’re right.”

“Come on,” she took him by the hand. “We’ve got eleven people and only enough beds for eight. If you, me, and Steve share, that’s only two who need to sleep on the floor.”

“Yeah, I doubt any of the others are going to want to sleep three to a bed,” Jonathan said with a little laugh. 

It turned out that Mike and Will volunteered to sleep on the floor, on either side of the bed Joyce and Eleven shared. Dustin and Lucas shared the other bed in their room. Robin and Max shared the second bed in Nancy’s room. 

While Steve was in the bathroom, washing up, Nancy knocked on the door. “Hey, it’s me. Can I come in?”

Steve opened the door, so Nancy let herself through before closing it again. “Are you okay?”

Looking in the mirror, Steve ran his hand through his hair, fluffing it up a little. “Yeah, don’t I look okay?” he asked, turning to face her. His face was clean but still cut up and bruised from the fight the day before. “I mean, I want to shower, but without clean clothes I almost think it would be worse, you know?”

Nancy took a step closer to him, stopping when he flinched away from her. “Steve?”

“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head and holding his arms out to her. He pulled her close, kissing her. “This is _not_ the way our last motel stay went.”

Nancy laughed softly, shaking her head. Pulling on him so she could whisper in his ear, Nancy said, “We could turn on the shower. Use the noise as cover so we could recreate that time in the bathroom.”

“The motel bathroom?” Steve asked, his fingers clenching against her hips. “God, if I wasn’t dead on my feet already, I would in a heartbeat.”

“Okay,” Nancy said. Really taking a look at his face, Nancy told him, “Jonathan is worried about what you think of him, after today. Like you’re afraid of him or don’t love him anymore or something.”

“It was just … a lot today, you know? A lot to process. I’ll get there.” Steve put another kiss on Nancy’s cheek. 

She stopped him with a hand around his wrist. “You might want to tell him that, Steve. You know? Clear communication.”

“That is … still a thing, yes,” he said with an almost-nervous laugh. “Okay, you win. I’ll talk to him.”

“Thank you.”

~*~

Jonathan didn't have anything to sleep in besides his jeans, or his underwear. With Max and Robin sharing the room with them, underwear wasn't exactly an option. At least not until he got under the covers while he waited for Nancy and Steve to finish getting ready for bed. He was uncomfortable enough that he decided the jeans had to go. He kicked them off and out of the bed on the far side from where Robin and Max had already settled down to sleep. 

Nancy came out of the bathroom first, kicking off her jeans too, and leaving them on the floor next to Jonathan's before climbing into bed with him. She kissed Jonathan, then put her back to his chest, wrapping his arm around her and holding it tight, his hand over her heart.

Jonathan kissed the back of Nancy's neck and buried his face in her hair. It tickled his nose, but it also reminded him of home. Well, of his home back in Hawkins, anyway.

When Steve came to bed, he left his clothes on. Normally, at home, Jonathan could barely get him to wear a shirt to bed, and he was usually 80/20 when it came to wearing just underwear or sleeping naked. What, did he think he needed extra clothes because there were other people in the room with them? Did he not think he could trust himself without them?

Steve got into the bed behind Jonathan, and he turned so they were back-to-back. Jonthan's stomach dropped.

Shit, things really _were_ messed up.

Maybe Steve was wearing his clothes to bed because he couldn't stand the thought of touching Jonathan after what he'd done.

What if this was it? What if Steve never got over this? What if he left Jonathan? The thought hurt a thousand times worse than any of the aches and pains Jonathan had accumulated over the past two days. He forced himself not to cry. 

Jonathan could tell by the way Nancy breathed that she'd fallen asleep. He could tell by the lack of snoring that Steve _hadn't_ fallen asleep. Jonathan waited for another half hour, by the clock on the nightstand, but Steve still wasn't sleeping.

He was just laying there with his back to Jonathan, not sleeping.

Fuck, this was unbearable.

Jonathan turned over. He didn't put his arm around Steve, but he pressed his forehead to the back of Steve's neck. It should have been comfortable. It had been comfortable dozens of times before. 

It wasn't comfortable.

Keeping his voice to a whisper so he wouldn't wake the others, Jonathan asked, "Will you tell me what you're thinking about?"

"World domination," Steve replied, apparently comfortable enough to joke at a time like this.

Jonathan had been lying here, thinking Steve was going to leave him as soon as possible, and Steve was telling _jokes_? "That's not funny."

"Okay, Jesus," Steve said, turning so he was lying on his back. "Sorry."

Jonathan put his chin on Steve's shoulder and looked at the shadow of his profile in the dark. "Tell me you don't hate me."

"I don't hate you," Steve said. Except, he hesitated for a couple seconds before pulling Jonathan half onto him. 

Jonathan settled against Steve, and even when he got comfortable, he still wasn't quite comfortable enough to sleep. This was stupid. Literally nine nights out of ten, this was the way he and Steve slept. This was the way they shared their bed. And here, now, it was what? Not good enough? 

Part of the problem had to be the fact that Steve was holding himself more rigidly than usual. It was difficult to get comfortable against him. Jonathan asked, "Why are you being weird?" 

"I'm just really tired," Steve told him.

He didn't rub his hand along Jonathan's back or hug him or anything. He just laid there, stiff and uncomfortable. Morning came and Jonathan still hadn't fallen asleep. 

Neither had Steve.

~*~

When El lay down in the motel room bed, it felt strange because it wasn’t her bed at home. She didn’t have to share her bed at home with Joyce, who she had to be careful of because of a broken arm and a still-healing concussion. 

Still, El was so tired that having a flat surface with a pillow and a blanket was comfortable enough that she fell asleep early. Some of the others were still talking, still brainstorming for the next day. 

Now that Nine was dead, most of their ideas didn’t matter anymore. It was fine. Nancy said that would happen. It was only wasted work if they didn’t learn something along the way. 

(That was another thing Nancy had taught her.)

So sleep came easily, and it was restful for the first half of the night. 

Then the dreams started. 

El dreamed she was in the Inbetween, searching her way through the darkness for anything. For everything. What rose out of the depths wasn’t Hop, it wasn’t even Mike. 

It was Nine. 

He laughed.

“You shouldn’t have let them kill me, Eleven,” he said, walking around El in a circle. He reminded her of a tv show she’d seen about sharks. “Now there’s so many things you won’t ever learn about.”

“I have teachers,” she told him, worrying about missing school in the morning. She was already so far behind the others in her class. 

“None of them are like you,” Nine told her. “Like us.”

El walked away from him, but Nine circled her again, using eerily long legs to catch up to her. The extra length of his legs made him taller, so he crouched in front of her and grinned again. “Did Brenner ever tell you why he had you call him, ‘Papa’?”

El had been starting to turn away from Nine, but this question made her stop. She shook her head. “No.”

“Because he _was_ your father. Your blood father. He _made_ you.”

“No he didn’t,” El insisted, but a sinking feeling festered in the pit of her stomach. “Mama…”

“Brenner was my father too,” Nine told her, rocking up onto his toes proudly. “That makes us brother and sister. You chose strangers over your own flesh and blood. They killed me, they killed one of Papa’s greatest achievements. And it’s all … your … fault.”

Nine smiled meanly, and he reminded El even more of a shark. 

El pushed him. “Go away!”

“What? You can’t handle the truth? You’re responsible for what happened to Papa, you know. You let loose the monster that killed him. Now you’re responsible for your brother’s death too. How many more have to suffer before you accept this about yourself? You're a killer, Eleven.”

With a scream of frustration and rage, El pushed Nine away again. “Brenner is not my father! Hopper is!”

“But Hopper is dying, Eleven,” Nine called from far away, across the inky black of the Inbetween. “He’s as good as dead, stuck in that hellhole. Let me bring you to our side. The righteous side. Leave all your capitalist pig friends and _maybe_ your policeman friend will survive.”

“No!” El cried, shaking off the bonds of sleep and sitting up in bed. 

The light coming through window told her it was morning, but El still felt like she needed more sleep. Except, she was afraid. What if Nine found her again, in her dream? 

She wanted to think that her dream about him was just a nightmare, that it didn’t mean anything, but El could still feel it. She could feel Nine trying to chip away at her, trying to make her one of his puppets. 

When would it stop? He was supposed to be dead. Today was supposed to be the day she got her Dad back. Or at least the day she found him, once and for all.

El put her hands on the sides of her head and growled with frustration. 

“Are you okay?” Mike asked from the floor next to El’s bed. 

“Hopper needs me,” she told him, which wasn’t exactly an answer to his question. She didn’t know if she was okay. She probably wasn’t, with her thoughts racing and her breaths coming too shallow, trying to strangle her. But to tell Mike that she wasn’t okay would make him worry. 

El didn’t want him to worry.

Mike climbed up and sat on the bed next to her. “Are you ready to look for him again? I can get the tape recorder.” 

El thought about this, about dipping back Inbetween now that Nine wasn’t waiting for her in the darkness. Something about it made her skin crawl. She shook her head and made an excuse. “It’s too noisy here. Too many people. Somewhere else.”

“Okay,” Mike said, wrapping his arms around Eleven and holding her close. Beside them, Joyce stirred. “We’ll find someplace quieter.”

It took awhile to get everyone awake and ready to go. Joyce had to call the school to tell them none of her kids were going to be there that day. Others had to check in with their parents and apologize again for going on their impromptu road trip. 

El felt bad. Everyone was here because of her. They were missing out on school and time with their families because of _her_.

When she saw Jonathan’s rough expression, and the dark circles under his eyes, she couldn’t help but follow him outside. The cold bit at her lungs, but she caught up with him, grabbing his arm. “You’re not okay,” she told him.

“No,” he said with a sad laugh. “No, I’m really not.”

“Bad dreams?” she asked, thinking about her own nightmares.

He shook his head. “Didn’t sleep.” Then he turned away from her and said, “Steve didn’t either.”

“Why?”

Jonathan rubbed his face with his hands. “I don’t know. He gave me some bullshit answer. Guess he doesn't realize I can tell when he's lying."

"Friends don't lie," she told him.

"Yeah, I know."

Everyone else poured out of the motel, divvying themselves up between the two cars, and nothing felt settled. Maybe if she could find Hopper, that would solve everything. El wasn't a child anymore. She knew that solutions never fixed all the problems. There were always more problems and more solutions to those problems in a dizzying, neverending way.

It was almost enough to make someone give up.

But El was a Hopper now, and a Byers. That meant she wasn't allowed to give up. Not now.

Not ever.

~*~

Nancy wasn't sure which direction would be best to head in, so she made an executive decision and led their little caravan south, back toward Springfield. If all else failed, it was where they'd all planned to be on Thursday, anyway. 

It took a little bit of time, but eventually the city and the suburbs fell away, and they were left driving though flat farm country. Looking at El in the rearview mirror, she asked, "What about around here? Is this quiet enough?"

El looked out the window for a long moment before saying, "Yes."

Nancy took the next exit. She drove a mile away from the freeway, eventually pulling over on the side of the road. Robin, driving Steve's car, parked behind them. In the mirror, Nancy could see Steve in the front passenger seat, frowning at the cow pasture beside them. Joyce and Jonathan were both asleep in the backseat, leaning against each other in the middle of the car.

Taking a deep breath, Nancy killed the engine and then turned the electrical back on. She tuned the radio to a frequency between stations and turned up the volume. Behind her, El brought a folded strip of cloth up to her eyes. In the passenger seat, Dustin clicked on Will's portable tape recorder, holding it near the front speaker. 

Nancy expected it to take El a moment before she found Hopper. After all, if he was all the way in Russia, it could take awhile for El to project herself that far. At least, that's what Nancy assumed. But almost immediately, El made a questioning noise.

Over the radio came the sound of someone singing, but it was distorted, like from far away. She couldn't make out what song it was, so Nancy assumed that they were picking up a radio station. She reached for the dial, but Dustin grabbed her wrist before she could turn it. Looking over at him in confusion, Nancy saw that his eyes were wide with surprise. He shook his head at her.

El took a sharp breath and the voice became clearer. Nancy could finally understand what it was singing. "...of beer on the wall, forty-five bottles of beer. Take one down, pass it around, forty-four bottles of beer on the wall." 

Nancy recognized that voice. Barely able to even whisper, she asked Dustin, "Is that Steve?"

Dustin nodded. 

Everyone except El turned around in their seats to look out the back window. Nancy couldn't see very well between El's and Mike's heads, but Steve looked just as bored as he had a minute before. "Is he moving his lips?"

"No," Lucas said from the far back. "There's no way he's singing."

"Is this some sort of recording?" Mike asked. "El?"

"Now," she said, the edges of her mouth turning down. "Happening now."

Max turned to face Nancy. "But he's not talking."

"...it around, forty-two bottles of beer on the wall!" Steve's voice said over the radio. Then the song stopped and Steve's regular speaking voice filled the car. "So, what do you think, dipshit? Annoyed yet? I could do this forever. Just think if I started at a _million_ bottles of beer. That could take _awhile_."

The next voice was different, and it made the hair on the back of Nancy's neck stand on end. "It's not going to work. You might as well give up."

"Yeah, I don't think so," Steve replied to the voice. "You've been rooting around in my memories, haven't you? When's the last time I ever gave up on something?" Nancy smiled. Yeah, that was her Steve. "Oh! You know what? I just remembered an even more annoying song. Do you want to hear it?"

"Bite me."

"Okay, here it goes!" Steve started singing again. "Young man! There's no need to feel down! I said young man! Pick yourself off the ground!"

The sound cut out as El removed the blindfold from her eyes. After blinking a few times, she focused on Nancy's face. "Nine is not dead."

"Holy shit," Dustin said. "Is Nine in Steve's brain? Is that what we just heard?"

El nodded.

"How is that even possible?" Mike asked, looking around the car.

In a small voice, Will said, "Nine is like the mind flayer. Except…" He looked over at El. "Except he's the human version of a mind flayer."

“Steve’s a spy…” Lucas realized, looking more worried than Nancy had ever seen him. 

"Everyone keep looking forward," Max said from the far back. "If Steve's a spy, we don't want him knowing we're onto him."

"This is insane!" Nancy cried, turning to look out the front windshield, when she just desperately wanted to look at Steve. She thought about talking to Steve in the bathroom the night before, about what she'd offered him. God, she felt sick. "If Nine is a human mind flayer how are we supposed to get him out of Steve? We can't assume that he's as heat intolerant as anything from the Upside Down."

"Which means we can't burn him out of Steve," Mike added to Nancy's thought. "He'd have the same heat tolerance as Steve. We'd just be killing Steve."

"We can't _kill_ Steve!" Dustin cried. "That's crazy talk."

"Then how do we get Nine out of him?" Lucas asked. "What if it's a one-way process?"

Clenching the steering wheel angrily, Nancy told the others, "We're not going to assume anything is a one-way process until we've done everything we can possibly think of. Now, help me think. Why did Nine choose Steve?"

"He was convenient?" Dustin asked.

Mike added, "He was there when Jonathan killed Nine's other body. Steve was there to jump into?"

Nancy had to turn around to face her brother when she asked, "Yeah, but why Steve? Why not Jonathan? He had to have been much _closer_ to Nine when he was killed."

"Yeah, because he was killing him," Lucas added. 

Nancy didn't miss the uncomfortable look that crossed Will's face at this comment. He'd obviously picked up on how rattled Jonathan had been by the whole ordeal. Of course he had. He and Jonathan were both sensitive to each other. Joyce too.

In fact, Will had communicated to Jonathan from the Upside Down. Nancy had somewhat attributed this to the fact that Will had been fundamentally changed by the time he spent in the Upside Down. However, Jonathan was _the only one_ who had heard him. Nancy had been right next to Jonathan and heard _nothing_.

Because Jonathan was different.

"Jonathan is different!" Nancy told the others. "He said when Nine made Steve pass out, he was surprised Jonathan didn't pass out too. That's how Jonathan got close enough to kill Nine. Because he's different, and Nine wasn't expecting that."

Will put his hand to his throat, saying, "But Nine had Jonathan under his control at the hospital. What changed in the meantime?"

Dustin and Mike looked at each other for a short second before saying at the same time, "The Upside Down."

"Yes," Nancy told them. "Between Nine being able to control him, and then not being able to, Jonathan went to the Upside Down. Maybe my initial hypothesis wasn't completely wrong."

"It had less to do with the Upside Down," Lucas said, leaning forward between Will and El's heads, "and more to do with a _Byers_ who'd been to the Upside Down."

Will met Nancy's eyes and said, "A little bit like El?"

Nancy nodded. "A little bit like El."

El looked between Will and Nancy, but then she smiled, like she liked being compared to Jonathan in that way. Then her expression changed. "A little bit like me?" 

Will nodded at her with a questioning look.

El put her hand in Will's and said, "Close your eyes."


	12. The Possession

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> El and Will formulate a plan to save Steve.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter in the end notes.

El watched Will close his eyes, and then she followed. It was harder to reach the Inbetween with the light coming in through her closed eyelids, but she didn't have to go very far. All she had to do was _pull_ Will into the black with her. 

Between one breath and the next, he was there, standing next to El and holding her hand. He looked around with wide eyes. "Whoa!"

"Inbetween," she told him, taking a few steps and tugging him along. Nodding to the figure on the horizon, El asked Will, "Can you see him?"

Will turned his head and looked. He took El a few steps closer before asking, "Is that Steve?"

The figure sat crouched on the dark floor of the Inbetween, his arms clasped tightly behind his head, forearms pressed to his ears. He was still singing something, a song El thought she recognized as one that came from Jonathan's and Steve's room fairly often. "... room where the light won't find you, holding hands while the world comes tumbling down…"

"Yeah," El told him, but when Will took another step toward Steve, El held him back. "Nine is close."

"But how do we help him?" Will asked her, his eyes pleading with her to let him take just one step more toward Steve. "We can't leave him like this."

El looked over to Steve, and when she focused on him, she could almost see a protective bubble that he'd crafted around himself. It was mostly transparent, but it had darker tendrils like vines or blood vessels wrapped around it. "Do you see that?" she asked Will.

"Yeah." Will shivered. "It reminds me of the Upside Down."

"It’s _made_ of Upside Down," she told Will, taking him with as she stepped around Steve. She carefully didn't move any closer so Nine wouldn’t notice them, but instead got a different angle to look at. "It's made of other stuff, too."

"There are cracks."

El sighed, noticing what Will did, her connection with him making them flare brighter in her mind's eye. "He doesn't have much time. Nine is winning."

"What do we do?"

Looking at Will, El felt for the first time in awhile that maybe his hand in hers _wasn't_ enough. They needed more. She remembered helping Billy resist the mind flayer over the summer. Reminding him of his mother had worked. They needed to do the same thing here with Steve. They needed happy memories. They needed people who could lend their strength to Steve, who could help _him_ build up the barrier around his mind.

They needed the people who loved him best.

El wasn't sure she'd be able to pull Nancy into the Inbetween like this. She reached forward, blindly grasping Nancy's shoulder and tried, but it didn't work. Nancy wasn't a little bit like El. 

But Jonathan _was_.

"I know what we need to do," she told Will, letting him see her plan.

He didn't even hesitate. He just said, "Let's go."

El opened her eyes and told Nancy, “Wait for Robin, then get as far away from here as fast as you can.” Once Nancy nodded, El followed Will from the car, wiping a trail of blood from under her nose and waving goodbye to Mike and the others.

Will approached the car and knocked on Robin’s window, waving her out of the car. She opened the door and got out, asking, “Do we have a plan?”

When Will looked to her, El told Robin, “We have a plan.”

“So?” asked Jonathan, out of the car and looking at them over the top of it. “What is it?”

“Robin needs to go with the other car,” Will told his brother, “and we need to give them a head start.”

"Now?" Robin asked, looking over at Jonathan.

El insisted, " _Now_."

Will took Robin's place in the driver's seat of the car, closing the door behind him. El went around the car, gesturing for Jonathan to get back in, and then she followed him, squeezing into the little car. 

In the passenger seat, Steve gave Will a look and said, "You're not thinking about driving my car, are you, bud?"

"No," Will told him, turning the key part of the way and putting on the radio. He tuned it, finding a radio station with music. Even without holding his hand, El could see his intention. "We're just going to wait here for awhile."

As Will began turning the radio dial away from the music and back through static, El put her hand on Jonathan's and pulled him into the Inbetween. "Don't talk, just trust me," she told him, ignoring his wide-eyed expression. "Grab your mom's hand."

Jonathan nodded. As soon as the connection was made, El could feel Joyce and through her, Will. She pulled both of them Inbetween with her, and in unison she and Will grabbed Steve. With the circuit complete, El hurtled all of them inside Steve's protective bubble with him.

Outside the bubble, Nine was yelling at Steve. "You're worthless! You're stupid! You're an eighteen-year-old has-been! Nothing in your life is ever going to get any better than you've already had it! You think you're going to get far? Let's see how far you get after you've broken your nose a few more times! See how far you get without your pretty face! Let's see how far you get when Nancy and Jonathan realize how _stupid_ you are! You're nothing!"

"What the hell is going on?" Joyce asked, no cast on her arm, looking around at the others before her eyes landed on Steve, sitting huddled in on himself at their feet.

"Oh, don't do this to me," Steve said as he looked up at them. "The other things weren't torture enough?"

El knelt down next to Steve, putting her hand on his shoulder. "I brought the rest of our family here to help you." She looked up at the others, watching as Will knelt down on Steve's other side, placing a hand on his arm.

"We're not Nine messing with you, Steve," Will told him, shooting Jonathan a look. "We love you. We're here to help you fight him."

Jonathan caught on just after Joyce did. He circled around Steve, sitting behind him, wrapping his arms around Steve and putting his chin on Steve's shoulder. "I'm here, Steve. I'm here, baby. I love you. Don't listen to him."

Joyce knelt down in front of Steve. She placed her hands on either side of his face. "You've done such a good job, Steven," she told him, smiling graciously and wiping a tear from his cheek. "We're here, and we want you to know how much we love you."

Tears falling from both his eyes, one after the other, Steve asked her, "You love me?"

"Yes," Joyce insisted, pressing a kiss to Steve's forehead. "Of course. Of course we do. We love you _very much_."

~*~

**21 hours prior**

When Steve’s eyes opened and he saw the blue sky above him, he experienced a small moment of joy. He wasn’t dead! 

And then he heard his voice groan, but he hadn’t intended on making the sound. He tried to turn his head to the side, but he couldn’t. 

His arm lifted up on its own and his hand rubbed his face, all without Steve making the decision to do so. When he tried to ask what the fuck was going on, words wouldn’t form on his lips. 

His head lifted up, and he saw Jonathan with his arm wrapped around Brad’s neck. Steve’s voice asked, “Are you killing him?”

What the absolute fuck?

_I didn’t say that!_

“You think I shouldn’t?” Jonathan asked, his face red with the effort of strangling Brad. 

_Who are you talking to? I didn’t say that! Jonathan! I didn’t say that!_

As his head ducked down to look at Brad’s face, Steve felt sick. His voice said, “He might be dead already.”

_Yeah, no shit!_

Suddenly, Steve pictured a whirlwind of his own memories, all of them about Jonathan. Meeting him in first grade, playing games with him at school, making fun of him with Tommy, fighting him, hugging him, kissing him, fucking him, whispering to him in the dark as they lay together trying to sleep.

_What the fuck was that?_

**Jesus, you’re such a sap. You really bought into all this love crap didn’t you?**

_Where did that voice come from? Who are you?_

Steve watched his hand reach out and touch Jonathan’s shoulder. “I’m okay, baby. You can let go.”

_Just tell me what’s going on!_

More memories flipped past Steve’s eyes. This time they focused on El. 

_You leave her alone_!

The focus changed to the moment El brought Steve into the Upside Down.

**Ah, so that’s how you did it. You poisoned yourself. It’s a little clever, I’ll grant you that. It definitely slowed me down. But you were stupid to think that you could stop me.**

_Nine_.

**Bingo! He’s finally got it! Took you long enough.**

_Okay, jackass. If you’re so smart, why did you let Jonathan kill you? Look at that. You’re fucking dead._

**Am I?**

When Robin and Joyce drove back and joined them, more memories flipped by.

**Jesus, what a shitty car. That’s the best you could do? And your best friend is a dyke? What a downgrade from a few years ago, huh?**

_Shut up!_

**You left your rich-ass parents to move in with some of the poorest people in town? You gave up on your father’s offer to pay for school and to get you a nice job? For what? The sake of your dick? Exactly how stupid are you?**

_Smart enough to know all that money stuff is bullshit._

**Bullshit? You think Nancy is going to want you after she goes to college? After she meets someone smarter, someone with actual prospects and ambition? No, it’ll just be you and Jonathan, two poor freaks living in backwater, USA, trying not to get your necks broken by the local hick posse. Face it. Your life wasn’t going anywhere. You might as well just give it up. I can do so many more fantastic, wonderful things with this body.**

Hurt and anger and sadness all built up in Steve, and they had nowhere to go. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t cry. He couldn’t punch something. 

But he couldn’t give up, either. 

Steve hated his father, hated all the things he said when he criticized Steve for not being good enough, for never being good enough. But Fred Harrington had also taught Steve some lessons. The first being: the key to being great at anything is practice. The second was taught to Steve indirectly, and was this: living with thoughts like the ones Nine was throwing at Steve was possible. Steve had been doing it for years. He'd had _plenty_ of practice.

He thought really hard about covering his ears, and to drown out the noise still filtering in, he did the first thing he could think of. He sang.

It got harder to hold on when Nine used his body to hug Nancy, and to kiss her. When Nine was trying to speak to Nancy, to use Steve’s memories to make her believe that everything was fine, Steve shouted. He held onto those memories until Nine had to rip them out of his shaking, bloody fingers. Even just that split-second of hesitation in Nine's speech had to count for something, right?

Steve sang louder. 

He sang the most irritating songs he could think of. He sang the songs that got themselves stuck in his head. He sang the songs he'd learned in the school yard. He sang the songs his parents would glare at him for singing in their presence.

When Jonathan laid down with him, tense and sleepless, Steve secreted away the words that would put Jonathan at ease. He pulled Nine into his worst memories, into the worst nightmares he'd ever had, into memories of every restless night he'd spent with shallow breaths and hammering heartbeats.

Maybe it wasn't worse than whatever Nine had gone through in his life, but these were Steve's memories. He'd already been through them more times than he could count. He'd lived through them endlessly. Nine hadn't. Not yet.

So Steve showed Nine these memories proudly.

_Look at this shit! This is what I've survived!_

It worked for awhile. 

When Steve felt himself starting to get tired, starting to slip, when Nine's voice got louder and louder in his head, Steve turned back to singing. He did his best to drown out everything but the next lyric, the next verse. He held on.

And then his family found him.

~*~

Jonathan pulled Steve’s back closer against his chest, putting his legs on either side of Steve's hips. He wrapped his arms around Steve and _held_ him. 

"I don't know what to do," Steve said, putting his hands on Jonathan's arms. "I don't know how to get rid of him."

El looked around for a second before standing, putting her back to the others. Over her shoulder she said, "Tell Steve good things. Good thoughts. Happy memories." She reached back and Will jumped up to join her. "He's almost found us."

Nine's arrival was heralded with a sound louder than Jonathan had ever heard before. It rattled his bones and hurt his head. 

"What the fuck are you doing?" Nine bellowed, making Will and Joyce both stagger. El stood strong.

She told Nine, "GO AWAY!" and _screamed_.

El screamed and Nine screamed back and Jonathan felt Steve going loose in his arms. "No, you gotta stay with me," Jonathan said, watching his mother stand up and hold Will’s hand, leaving Steve to him. "Steve, you have to remember good things."

Off in the distance, Jonathan saw the demogorgon standing in his old living room, crouched over another, younger version of himself. It was strange to be looking at himself, although he had to admit that some of his nightmares started off this way, looking at himself while the demogorgon attacked him. In this version, instead of Steve coming to the rescue, the monster eviscerated Jonathan. Dark blood pooled under his body and his eyes stared at nothing.

"No, not like that," Jonathan told Steve. "No, remember… remember the first time you hugged me. That day in the school bathroom? I hadn't slept, and you _hugged_ me. You decided you were done with being an asshole. You decided to be _kind_."

Steve grabbed Jonathan's arm, fingers tight around his wrist. The image in front of Jonathan changed, and he saw himself laying back on Steve's old bed, relaxed and smiling. He reached toward what Jonathan realized had to be Steve. Steve leaned forward and kissed him.

"That was the first time we kissed, wasn't it?" Jonathan asked.

Steve nodded. 

"I'm so glad you did that," Jonathan told him. "I didn't even realize I had feelings for you until then." He chuckled, pressing a kiss to the side of Steve's jaw. "I just thought I had feelings for Nancy. I didn't realize that falling in love with two different people would feel so different for each of you."

This time when Jonathan showed up in Steve's thoughts, he was even younger still. Jonathan guessed from the clothes he was wearing and the bag at his feet that it had to be seventh grade. He had been pretty small, then. Smaller than most of the other boys in his grade, despite also being older than most of them. He was sitting at a lunch table alone, reading while he ate. Steve kept sneaking glances at him. Tommy must have noticed, because he sneered, "Look at the loser, sitting all alone!"

"Yeah," Jonathan heard Steve's younger voice say, almost hesitantly. "Loser."

The words hurt, of course they did. It didn't matter now, but Jonathan got curious. He asked Steve, "Why were you looking at me like that?"

Steve lifted his shoulders in a shrug. Finally, Steve said, "I couldn't figure it out either. Every time I did, my stomach hurt."

Jonathan smiled against the back of Steve's shoulder. "Are you saying that you had a crush on me when you were in eighth grade?"

"Hey, I had crushes on a lot of people when I was in eighth grade," Steve said, tilting his head back so he could kind of see Jonathan's face. "You weren't _that_ special. Plus I didn't even _realize_ that's what it was at the time. I thought maybe I was lactose intolerant."

Laughing again, Jonathan asked Steve, "Is that what it felt like when you first started liking Nancy?"

Jonathan felt heat on the back of his neck, and a loud crash made him flinch. 

Steve held onto him tight and showed him Nancy. She was sitting across the library from Steve, wrapping her hair around a finger while she read from one of her text books. She looked up and the light from the window made her blue eyes shine. 

"Yeah," Jonathan told Steve, feeling the hopeless attraction Steve had felt in that moment. “Yeah, me too.”

The ground beneath them rumbled. Wracking his brain for more good memories, Jonathan asked Steve, “Remember the first time it was just the two of us?”

Steve pulled Jonathan closer. “Tell me about it.”

“I was nervous,” Jonathan admitted. “I knew you liked to kiss me, but I wasn’t sure you’d ever want more than that. Like I did. We were in my room at the old house. I kept my pants on at first, despite how much I wanted you. I didn't want to scare you away.” He laughed a little. "Of course, you had no problems with getting naked right away."

“I had such a thing for your hands after that day,” Steve told him, holding on tight as the banging sound above them got even louder. 

Specks of rubble began to fall like hail in a storm. 

His voice soft, Steve said, “Tell me another.”

“Remember all those nights we would lay in bed, in _our_ bed, just listening to music and talking?” Jonathan asked.

The ground tilted.

"Remember all the nights one of us would help the other after a nightmare?"

The loud sounds started to fade.

"Remember…" Jonathan pressed his face against Steve's back, not quite able to get out the words he needed to. 

They were too close to his heart. But maybe if they were close to Jonathan's, they'd be close enough to Steve's to be the edge they needed. Maybe they'd be enough to win this fight. 

"Remember the night I asked you to hurt me, and you wouldn't?"

Steve nodded and told Jonathan, “It was so dark that night.”

“It was easier to admit what I wanted when I couldn’t see your face.”

“You were mean.”

“I was hurting.”

Steve turned around, kneeling between Jonathan's legs and taking Jonathan’s face in his hands. “I hate it when you’re hurting.”

Jonathan wrapped his hands around Steve’s wrists, and met his eyes. “Please believe me when I tell you that the thought of losing you makes me hurt so much, I feel like I’m going to die.”

Steve kissed him. 

Then Steve put his hand in Jonathan’s and stood up. “Let’s finish off this son of a bitch.”

Jonathan followed as Steve went to El and put his free hand on her shoulder. The jolt that went through him at the touch felt like static electricity. He wasn’t quite sure what to do at first.

But then Jonathan realized he was already doing it. He was pushing away everything Nine, and holding onto everything that was Steve. Through El he could see the Upside Down, and in it a barren field full of ashes. 

They packaged Nine back into an image of his old body, and together they _pushed_ him into the Upside Down.

Jonathan blinked and he was back in the car. To his right sat El, wiping blood from under both nostrils. To his left sat his mom. Steve was in the front passenger seat, slumped over. Jonathan reached for him, shaking him by the shoulder. 

“Steve?”

He didn’t stir. Something was wrong. 

“Let me out,” Jonathan said to El, scrambling out of the car after her. He wrenched open the front passenger door and ducked in. “Steve!”

Jonathan pressed his ear to Steve’s chest. He heard nothing. “Shit!”

A few months after Will had come back from being lost in the Upside Down, while Jonathan’s nightmares still plagued him more often than not, he’d taken a CPR class over the course of a couple weekends. It had seemed like a pragmatic approach for dealing with his anxiety surrounding the fact that so many people he cared about had almost died. 

It was only because of this training that Jonathan acted automatically. 

He unbuckled Steve’s seatbelt, hauled him out of the car, and laid him out on the flat gravel on the side of the road. Jonathan found the right place on Steve’s chest – he knew where each of Steve’s ribs were by heart after sleeping on them most every night for the past two years – and started compressions. 

Joyce dropped down next to him, tilting Steve’s head back and putting the fingers of her good hand on either side of his nose. When Jonathan paused his compressions and said, “Go,” she gave two deep breaths into Steve’s lungs. 

Jonathan didn’t cry. He wouldn’t let himself. He pushed every worry he’d ever had about Steve and his safety off to the side. It wouldn’t help now. 

All Jonathan had to do was keep pushing and keep counting. "One, two, three, four…"

Joyce gave a second round of breaths. 

Still nothing. 

Jonathan’s arms trembled and sweat rolled down the side of his face, painfully cold in the wintery air. None of that mattered. Only the counting mattered. "...fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty."

Joyce gave one breath and before she went in for the second one, Steve coughed. He inhaled a deep gasp, his chest filling under Jonathan’s hands. 

Jonathan let himself sit back, drop his face into his hands, and sob. He couldn’t tell if he was crying out of relief that Steve was breathing, or out of the terror of almost losing him. Someone put an arm around Jonathan’s shoulders – either El or Will, judging by the size.

Then a hand weakly patted Jonathan’s sneaker. Without even looking, Jonathan put his hand around it, squeezing Steve’s fingers. 

After a minute, Joyce said, “Come on. Let’s get him up off the cold ground.”

Between Jonathan and Will, they got Steve into the back seat of the car. He coughed and said, “Thanks.”

Jonathan hugged him, wanting to say something, wanting to give him shit for almost dying, but the best thing he could come up with was a whispered, “I love you.”

“–you too.”

As Jonathan got back out of the car, he looked at the others. Everyone was tear-stained and looking rough. He asked them, “Can we go home? Just for tonight?”

“We can go home,” El told him, with a nod. “We need to recharge our batteries.”

Joyce laughed and pulled her into a hug. “Oh I wish we could.” She looked at Steve, she said, “But I think a visit to the hospital might be in order first.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for this chapter: a near-death situation where CPR has to be administered.


	13. The Vision

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Nine out of the way, permanently, El tries again to locate her dad.

Nancy drove away from Steve and Jonathan. She hated it more than each and every time she’d had to leave them before. There was no telling whether or not El’s plan was going to work. There was no telling whether or not Steve was going to come back. There was no telling if _any_ of the others was going to come back. 

If she lost both Steve and Jonathan?

She hadn’t let herself think it too often, but ever since Steve had moved with Jonathan and his family, she’d had this awful feeling that they were going to decide they worked better as a couple. She’d been afraid they were going to choose to leave her. 

But if they chose to leave, then at least they’d still be alive. If they left her because something bad happened, and she was the only one left alive?

She couldn’t handle it. 

Not again. 

Not after Barb. 

When Nancy saw a diner, busy with the lunch crowd, she pulled into the lot. If this wasn’t fucking far enough to avoid one of their number getting infected with Nine, then going any farther wouldn’t matter. 

Nancy parked the car. 

She got out of the car. 

She walked out of the parking lot and into the field next to it before covering her eyes and allowing herself to cry. 

Nancy only got about ten seconds into crying before someone pulled her into a hug. It was Robin. Nancy appreciated that she didn’t try to say anything about how it was all going to be okay, and how she was sure Steve was going to be fine. She just held onto Nancy and let her cry. 

When she felt a little more in control of her emotions, Nancy stepped back, sniffling and saying, “Thanks.”

“Hey, of course,” Robin said with a sad smile. Nancy realized she was probably really freaked out by the thought of Steve dying, too. He was her friend.

Nancy hadn’t seen him before, but Mike was standing a few feet behind Robin. When he saw Nancy looking at him, he held up a wad of paper napkins. She recognized them from the glove compartment of the car. “Here,” he said gently. 

With a little laugh, Nancy took the napkins, wiping her face and blowing her nose. “Thank you.”

“Sure,” he said, a little awkwardly, but he meant well.

“Should we get a table, maybe?” Robin asked, pointing to the diner. “I don’t suppose we have any idea how long this is going to take?”

“No clue,” Nancy replied. “But maybe we should get a table. Wait for them to be done.”

“It _is_ almost lunchtime,” Mike pointed out, but he looked about as hungry and Nancy felt. Which was to say, too nervous and sick to feel hungry. 

Between the six of them, they had enough money for sodas and a couple plates of fries. When the waitress brought these, she asked, "What's the matter? You guys look like you're about to go to a funeral."

Nancy winced. Beside her, Robin snapped, "Actually, we're waiting to hear whether one of our friends is going to pull through."

The waitress looked at Robin for a second like she was waiting for the other half of the joke to land. When it didn't, she put a hand over her mouth. "Oh my god! I'm so sorry. My-my condolences."

She beat a hasty retreat, and honestly, Nancy couldn't blame her.

The wait was excruciating. Nancy spent at least ten minutes nibbling on one fry. Nobody spoke.

And then, more than an hour later, Robin suddenly stood up. Nancy expected her to excuse herself to the bathroom or something, but instead she walked over to the front door of the diner.

Nancy shared a look with the others before they all scrambled to stand up and follow.

That was Steve's car in the parking lot. It had to be, right? It parked right next to her station wagon.

Nancy barely checked for cross traffic as she ran out into the lot. By the time she got to the car, Jonathan and Will had already gotten out.

"Where is he?" Nancy asked breathlessly as Jonathan caught her in a one-armed hug. "What happened? Did it work?"

Before Jonathan could answer any of Nancy's questions, she ducked down to look into the car. Steve was laid out in the backseat, his head in Joyce's lap.

"It worked," Jonathan told her, opening Joyce's door. He said to his mother, "You can probably call from here."

Nancy switched out positions with Joyce, putting Steve's head in her lap. Jonathan got in the back seat through the other door, taking El's place with Steve's legs and feet in his lap. When Jonathan closed his door, they were alone.

Steve smiled up at Nancy sleepily and she held his hand as Jonathan recounted what had happened.

"Wait," Nancy said, stopping Jonathan with a hand on his arm. "El actually brought you _inside_ Steve's mind?"

As Jonathan nodded, Nancy wasn't sure whether she felt incredibly weirded out, or incredibly jealous. Jonathan and Steve were already so close after living together full time for the past six months. Now they got to have this extra layer of closeness too?

It wasn't fair.

It wasn't equal.

And then Jonathan described helping Steve fight Nine off by remembering happy memories together, and Nancy felt even worse. She had plenty of happy memories with Steve. It wasn't fair that she wasn't allowed to help him too.

Nancy only realized how stupid she was being when Jonathan wiped his eyes and said, "When we all woke up, Steve didn't."

"Was Nine still in there somehow?" she asked. 

Jonathan shook his head. "He-he…"

With his eyes closed, Steve reached his free hand toward Jonathan. "Okay now," he mumbled.

"Yeah, but you _weren't_ ," Jonathan replied, sounding almost pissed off. "Your heart _stopped_."

Nancy's own heart plunged into her stomach at hearing this.

Jonathan continued, "We had to give you CPR!"

"Oh my god!" Nancy cried, looking down at Steve. No wonder he looked so sleepy and out of it. She brushed her hand through Steve's hair, blinking back tears. She'd been so scared while waiting at that diner, and to suddenly know that her fears had been resoundingly justified was too much to bear. Not able to stand the thought that Steve's health might still be in danger, Nancy asked, "Why aren't we on the way to the hospital?"

"We were going to," Jonathan told her. "But Mom brought up a good point. We can't exactly tell a normal doctor that Steve almost died because a psychic parasite set up camp in his brain. She's calling Owens for instructions."

"Wanna go home," Steve muttered.

"Yeah, me too," Jonathan told him, leaning closer to Nancy until he had his head on her shoulder.

Nancy closed her eyes, holding Steve close, leaning against Jonathan in turn, and doing her best not to freak out about everything that had just happened.

Eventually, Joyce got into the passenger seat of the car. She looked back, gave Nancy and Jonathan sympathetic looks, and said in a gentle voice, "Here's what we're going to do. There's a Naval hospital on the coast of Lake Michigan. Owens is meeting us there."

"What about everyone else? Are they coming too?" Nancy asked.

Joyce shook her head. "I'd rather not _bring_ El right back to the DOE if I can help it. I'm sending everyone else back to Hawkins. Will and El will stay with your parents for a day or two."

Clearing his throat, Steve asked, "Does this mean Thanksgiving's cancelled?"

"We'll see," Joyce said with a sigh, patting Steve's knee. "Don't you worry about it."

~*~

The drive to Hawkins wasn't as long as El had anticipated it being. When she told this to Mike, he had Dustin pass back a map. He showed her where they had started, in comparison to Chicago (close), Springfield (far), and Hawkins (not as far).

When they reached Mike's house, Robin left the station wagon keys with Mike and rode her bike away. El could sense that she felt sad, and after a moment realized it was because she was scared for Steve.

Mrs. Wheeler came out of the house, hugging Mike, then Will. She gave El her hand to shake. "Hi, Eleanor. Joyce told me all about the accident that broke her arm and put poor Jonathan in the hospital. Of course you and Will can stay as long as you need to!"

El wanted to correct her. It wasn't Jonathan in the hospital, it was Steve. Before she said anything, she noticed Mike and Will both shaking their heads at her.

Oh, it was a lie.

It was one of those "good" lies she'd learned about this year, like telling everyone at school that she and Will were twins.

El hated having to keep the lies straight.

After being fed dinner, El was shown to Nancy's room to get ready for bed. She took a shower and dressed in a pair of pajamas she found in Nancy's dresser. Then she found a dark colored scarf in the top drawer and tied it around her eyes to test it.

Perfect.

She untied the scarf and took it down the hall to Mike's room, knocking on the door.

When Mike answered, El held up the scarf and told him, "Hopper."

"If you feel like you can," Mike told her with a nod, looking over his shoulder at Will on the top bunk. "Sure.”

Once everything was set, El drifted Inbetween. She touched on Mike, so close by, and then found her way to Hopper.

He looked rough, maybe even worse than he had a few days before. He was awake, but was lying on the ground of his prison cell, just sort of staring straight ahead. The walls around him looked subtly different than the first time she'd found him.

El left Hopper's side, wandering out of his cell and down the hallway. It was a different hallway than before, too. The soldier who answered the telephone wasn't there. Her office wasn't where El thought it should have been, either. 

They must have moved him.

Remembering the dream she'd had about Nine, it made her wonder if he'd called Hopper's captors and told them to move him. He seemed to think he had some sort of power over them, or at least knew he could get El to trade herself in for Hopper's freedom.

Maybe when she came for Hop, she could find evidence that Nine had been working for these people. 

She found a deep staircase at the end of the hallway full of prison cells. It went down at least eight stories from where she stood. It also went up. Figuring a higher vantage point would be better, at least to start, El climbed the stairs.

Distantly, she heard Mike ask, "How's it going?"

"Looking for clues," she told him.

At the top of the stairs, El floated through a heavily-bolted doorway. On the other side wasn't a roof, like she'd expected. It was another floor of the building. A guard stood at the door, and the uniform he wore was different from those of the guards inside the prison. This uniform reminded her of the officer who used to walk the hallways at Hawkins lab. His uniform wasn't exactly the same as the ones she remembered, but it wasn't that different either.

El walked away from the guard, exploring further. As long as she didn't try to see too far in one direction or another, it wasn't much of a strain to keep looking. When she turned a corner, she was met with another hallway, but this one had windows on the left. Instead of looking outside, they looked over some sort of giant room full of machines. There were lots of workers running the machines, all of them wearing white coats, goggles and masks. 

They reminded her of the scientists at the lab.

For a moment, El thought these machines must be like the one built under Hawkins, like the one they thought killed Hop. But there was no green liquid, no fancy lights.

And there seemed to be a lot of birds.

"I don't…" El told the others. "I don't know what this is."

"Can I see?" Will asked.

Nodding, El put her hand on her knee, palm-up. When she felt Will's hand slide into hers, she _pulled_ him into the Inbetween with her. 

Pointing him toward the machines, El asked, "What is it?"

Will frowned through the window for a moment before he appeared to understand. "It's a chicken processing plant."

"Really?" Mike asked.

"Yeah," Will told him. He took El by the hand. "Can we look over here farther?"

El let Will take the lead, because he obviously had an idea. 

There was a door ahead of them and when Will looked up, El could see it too. "Exit."

"It's in English," Will pointed out.

Huh. El hadn't known there might be a different kind of sign in a different language, though it made perfect sense now that she thought about it. "What else do you see?" El asked him.

"Let's go in that office," Will said, pointing to one of the doors. It had the name "Jarod Smith" written on a plaque next to the door.

El pulled Will through the door, despite his hesitance, and they found a man on the other side, sitting at the desk. 

He was talking on the phone, so El routed his voice through the radio in Mike's room. "...think you'll be really pleased with our performance this month, Mr. Zelnick. We've been hitting our production quotas every single day." 

While the man listened to his phone, Will stepped closer to his desk, looking down at the papers on it. "Hey, Mike. Write this down."

"Wait…" Mike said. "Okay, I'm ready."

As Will rattled off some numbers that El understood were some sort of address, she listened more carefully to the man as he began to speak. "No, no. There's been no trouble with the extra task you've given us. It hasn't affected our quota, no."

El thought he might have been talking about the jail under the factory.

"Apparently it enjoys offal almost as much as live meat… Yes, that's what they tell me. We're producing slightly less waste stream fertilizer, but that was never a very large portion of our income from value-added processes."

"Is he talking about what I think he's talking about?" El asked Will.

The man continued. "No personnel losses since September… That's right. Well, thank you, Mr. Zelnick. We're so glad you're happy with our work!"

Will looked at El with wide eyes. "Yeah, I think he might be." Shivering, he asked her, "Can you tell where the demogorgon is?"

Closing her eyes, El thought carefully. She looked for something that felt _cold_ like the Upside Down. “Somewhere below,” she told Will. 

Letting him out of the Inbetween, she stepped closer to it on her own. It was there, feasting. Evil and hungry, thinking only about it’s next meal. It felt different from the first demogorgon she had met. It felt more solid, somehow. More tethered to the Rightside Up. Not quite as alien. More...animal.

Oh. El understood. She told the others, “It’s still young. Dangerous, but still happy to be fed.”

“Are you saying a time will come when it’s not happy to be fed?” Mike asked.

“Yes,” El told him. 

She made one last stop, a few floors up in a damp cell. Crouching down in front of Hopper, who had his eyes closed, she told him, “It’s been 135 days. I’m coming for you.”

“I know you are, kiddo,” he sighed. “I know you are.”

Ripping the blindfold from her face, El choked on a sob. She let Mike wrap his arms around her. 

Will picked up the notebook from beside Mike and read it. “You guys,” he said, “this isn’t that far away.”

“Twenty miles or something,” Mike replied, giving El an encouraging smile. “We don’t even have to go to Russia to save him. We can do this, El.”

She smiled, because she believed him.

~*~

“Ah, so this is our expected guest,” one of the doctors said as Jonathan helped Steve get out of the wheelchair he’d taken from the car into the hospital and into the hospital bed. “You would not believe the calls I’ve been getting this afternoon!”

Joyce said something to the doctor in a low voice while Steve laid back down. His whole chest hurt and it was hard to breathe, but Jonathan and Nancy both worked together to carefully take off his jacket and shirt and replace them with a hospital gown. 

Steve noticed that there weren’t any other hospital workers in the room as the doctor (Commander Andy, he called himself), got the story from the others. While he was listening and nodding, he put little tubes blowing air up Steve’s nose. Then he taped wires to a few different places on Steve’s bruise-mottled chest and started a machine. Steve held onto Nancy’s hand, wishing he could hold onto Jonathan’s as well.

“So, Steve,” Andy said, watching the machine for a moment before turning towards him. “How are you feeling?”

“Shitty,” Steve replied. “Hard to breathe.”

“Hmmm,” he said, taking out his stethoscope and putting it on Steve’s chest. “Anoxia could have damaged the small capillaries of the lungs. Could be causing edema. The extra oxygen will help.”

Whatever the fuck that meant. “Feels more like when I busted a rib,” Steve told him. 

The doctor listened for a moment before asking, “When was that?”

“Year ago,” Steve told him, using his free hand to point to the spot on his left side that still hurt when it was about to rain.

Looking up at Joyce, Andy asked, “You administered CPR?”

“I did,” Jonathan said, frowning. 

“Ah, young guy like yourself? With those big muscles? I’ll be surprised if we don’t find at least a couple rib fractures.” He winked and put his hand on Jonathan’s wrist and assured him, “Means you were doing it right.”

Jonathan still looked like he was going to be sick. 

“I’m glad you did it,” Steve told him, earnestly.

The doctor looked through the tape coming out of the machine for a moment and then said, “Well, Steve. You look about as healthy as most of the young men I see before they ship out. We’ll get that X-ray and have you resting for the next few weeks, but I’m not seeing anything that makes me worry.

Jonathan let out a loud breath and turned away, looking out the window. Nancy squeezed Steve’s hand. Joyce said, “Thank you, Doctor.”

“Yeah, thanks, Doc,” Steve said, feeling like he could go for a nap.

He zoned out for awhile, and when he woke up again, Nancy and Jonathan were looking out the window, talking. Pointing, Nancy said, “It’s just that way a couple miles.”

“Do you want to drive through on our way home?” Jonathan asked her, and Nancy nodded. 

“It’s not stupid, right? To think that we could go to college and make it, right?”

“If we can survive killer superhumans,” Jonathan told her, pressing a kiss to Nancy’s temple, “I bet college is gonna be a piece of cake.”

“Jinxed it,” Steve said, drawing their attention back over onto him. “Why’d you have to go and say that?”

Once the surprise wore off, Jonathan laughed.


	14. The Rescue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> El and her friends coordinate a rescue operation.

"Is everybody ready?" Mike asked through his radio. "Over."

"Zoomer and Boomer are a go," replied Lucas' voice. "Over.

Dustin said, "Radar and Diana are a go. Over."

Looking over at Mike, Will picked up his own radio. He checked in with El, who nodded, and then said, "Wonder Twins are a go. Over."

"Okay," Mike said through his radio. "This is Gold Leader. On my mark."

El watched Mike as he looked over the fence with his binoculars. After a guard passed by, Mike said, "Okay. Mark. Radar and Diana, you are a go."

Mike nodded back to El, who opened the fence, peeling back the wire with her powers. Over at the gate house, Robin's car pulled up. Distantly El heard Robin cry out, "Oh my god! You have to help me! My little brother is choking!"

"Now," Mike whispered, following as El and Will moved together through the fence and toward the factory. 

When they got to the building, Mike said into his radio, "Zoomer and Boomer. You're a go."

"Copy."

"A few seconds later, on the opposite side of the factory, there was a loud explosion.

El thought that whoever decided to let Max and Lucas learn chemistry was either a genius or a dumbass. 

The horn of a large truck blared and it crashed through another section of fence, heading away from the factory.

El, Mike, and Will hid behind an emergency exit door as terrified night workers left the building. Before the door closed, El caught it and the three of them slipped inside.

They made their way to the hallway that ended in the thick door, running toward the guard at the end.

He called out, "Hey! What are you kids doing here?"

El threw him into the wall. Working together, Mike and Will took the guard's weapons and his keys, then duct taped his hands and feet together. Footsteps approached from behind them and El put a hand on Will's shoulder, ready to push if she needed to.

"This is Radar approaching, Gold Leader," the radios called out. "Avert friendly fire!"

El put her hand down. Dustin and Robin turned the corner, so El set her sights on the door. It was heavy and thick, and didn't have any key holes she could see.

"I think it only opens from the inside," Will told her.

El closed her eyes and popped the locks. As Robin took the gun out of Mike's hand and started checking it over, El told the others, "Stand back." She held onto Will and pulled the door open.

A few shots came through the now-open doorway. El closed her eyes again, found the attackers beyond the door, and sent all three of them to the Upside down.

"Clear," she told the others.

Mike nodded. "Zoomer and Boomer, this is Gold Leader. You're a go for phase two."

Another explosion rocked the building.

El led the way into the prison, Will on her left, Robin with the gun on her right. Mike and Dustin followed. As men in uniforms showed up – one or two at a time – El pushed them into the Upside Down.

After they passed one of the doors, Mike said, "We're breaking off here. Be safe!"

"You, too," El told him, noting the way Dustin gave Robin his radio. Then he went with Mike into one of the rooms, closing and locking the door behind them.

A moment later, Mike's voice came over the radio, "Okay, we've got eyes on everything. First level is clear. You have five bogeys coming up the stairs from sublevel 2."

"Save your strength," Robin told El as they put their backs against the wall. Robin looked around the corner, brought up the gun, and popped off five rounds. Into her radio, Robin asked, "We clear, Gold Leader?"

"Uh, yeah, Diana. You're clear. Proceed to target."

"Where'd you learn to shoot like that?" Will asked as El let Robin lead the way. When they passed the dead soldiers, Robin kicked guns away from all of them. She stopped at the last one to pick up another clip of bullets.

Robin reloaded her gun and said, "Nancy and I have gone practicing a few times."

El thought she could tell Robin wasn't telling the complete truth, but that was a matter for a different time.

Hopper was close. El could feel him.

Working together with Mike and Dustin on the security cameras, El, Will, and Robin cleared two more floors. Finally, they reached the right one.

"Hold, Wonder Twins!" Dustin cried over the radio. "There's something coming up the stairs. It's moving fast!"

"I can feel it," Will told her. 

"Me too," she replied, holding tightly to Will's hand as she looked over the railing, down the stairwell.

"Let's send it back."

El held out her hand down the stairwell toward it, but it was moving too fast. She needed a better look at it.

"Back up!" she told Robin, holding onto Will and walking backward away from the stairs. A second later, it leaped up, landing in front of El and screaming.

Will flinched and pulled away from El, and she lost her lock on the upside down. She had to change strategy as the demogorgon leapt at her, pushing it through physical space and holding it against the far wall. She _wanted_ to push it over into the Upside Down, but she just couldn't find it.

"Will!" she cried out, struggling to hold the demogorgon back. It was well-fed and _strong_.

A gunshot went off behind her, but the demogorgon wasn't hit. Vaguely, El thought maybe Robin was shooting at something else.

And then Will touched El's arm and all the strain of holding the demogorgon back faded away. She pushed it that half-step sideways, trapping it back where it belonged. In the Upside Down.

And just for the hell of it, she vanished the last two Russian guards as well. They had kept her Dad prisoner for 136 days. They deserved it.

"You're all clear, Wonder Twins," Mike said over the radio. "Let's secure the package and go home."

El looked at Will in confusion. No one had told her about any packages.

Will shook his head and told her, "He means, let's get Hopper out of here."

Oh, that made more sense.

"Do you know which one he's in?" Robin asked, looking down the stairwell like she expected there to be another demogorgon. El was sure there wasn't.

El pointed down the hallway of the floor they were on. Halfway down, she popped open a cell door. Without waiting for the others, El ran forward. She skidded to a stop in the doorway, and there he was. "Dad!"

"That you makin' all that racket out there?" he asked, but he had his joking smile on and he reached for her.

El went to him, dropping down on the ground next to Hop and throwing her arms around him. "Sorry I'm so late."

"No, no, kiddo," he murmured, petting her hair and kissing her cheek. "You did so good."

Behind them, Robin said, "We should probably get out of here and save the hugs for later. Chief, can you walk?"

"I'll give it a shot," Hop insisted, letting El and Will help him to his feet. "Aw, hell. Does your mother know you're here?" Hop asked Will.

"No," he said, taking some of Hopper's weight across his shoulders. "But if we get out of this, I'm pretty sure she'll forgive me."

Hopper laughed, hugging Will closer as he and El helped Hop limp out of his cell. Robin walked ahead of them, gun up as she spoke into her radio, "Gold Leader, we have the package. How's our exit looking?"

"Five-by-five, Diana," Dustin told her. "Five-by-five."

Then Mike came over the radio. "Ready for extraction, Zoomer?"

"We're locked and loaded, Gold Leader," Max said. "Waiting at the rendezvous point."

Hopper scoffed. "You kids are so goddamn weird."

"Sometimes weird is what works," El told him.

He smiled and kissed her hair.

They collected Mike and Dustin and headed out the way they came. El decided to lock the large door between the prison and the factory. Hop could let someone know about it when he was ready.

Just as they reached the emergency exit that would take them out of the factory and to the rendezvous point, someone at the end of the hall called out, "Stop right there! Federal agents!"

El reached for Will, but Robin called out, "Whoa! Wait! They're with me!"

"Buckley?" Called one of the men, putting his gun away. The other followed suit. "Intel said we had an asset on the ground."

"Asset?" Dustin asked, and El had to admit she was pretty confused too.

"Yes, hi, hello," Robin said. "Agent Keller. These people are all assets."

The one Robin called Keller rolled his eyes. "Friendlies, Buckley. We call them friendlies."

"Excuse me," she replied, holding up her hands defensively. "Look, I was hoping you guys would get here before I had to follow a bunch of kids into a dangerous situation. Since you _didn't_ , can you do us all a favor and let the kids go? Owens at DOE can debrief them in the morning."

"Owens?" Keller asked, looking around at El and her friends. "Ah, shit. These are _them_ , aren't they?"

"Affirmative."

Keller sighed. "Fine. But your ass is grass if you don't report bright and early." He looked at Hopper. "And get this man to a hospital, would you? Check him in as John Doe for now."

"Yes, sir," Robin said, gesturing for the others to head out the door. "And, um, here," she said as El followed Dustin and Mike. "I commandeered myself a weapon."

"Get out of here, Buckley! This is going to be hard enough to explain as it is!"

As they crossed the space between the building and the open section of fencing, Dustin hissed at Robin, "What the hell was that?"

"After what happened over the summer," Robin told him, "the CIA kind of recruited me."

"You're a fucking _spy_?" Mike asked.

Robin shushed him, hissing, "Would you be quiet? I'm in _training_ to be an _analyst_. I'm not supposed to go on secret rescue missions!"

El understood now why she had thought Robin was lying earlier. She hadn't been telling the whole truth. 

"That is so goddamn cool," Dustin sighed.

On the other side of the fence, Lucas was waving them toward their transport – a white panel van. El had no idea where they'd gotten it from, and she really saw no reason for asking.

Before they got going, Robin went to Max in the driver's seat and said, "Move it, short stuff."

"Aw, man!" Max cried, but she gave up the seat, climbing into the back with the others. "Just one more year and I'll have my license!"

"God help us," Hop muttered, but he smiled and hugged El close.

As they drove, Mike clicked on a flashlight and pointed it at some papers in his hands. "Look what we found in that security office. Familiar face?"

El focused on the picture he showed her. "That was Nine."

"I thought he might have been," Mike said. "I think you were right. He was working for the Russians."

"I'm sorry, who is this boy?" Hopper asked, pulling the picture closer to his face. "I remember seeing him in there."

"Brother," El told him, taking the picture and giving it back to Mike. "He's dead now."

" _Your_ brother?" Hop asked.

El nodded.

"Oh, Jesus, El. I'm sorry."

"Don't be," El assured him. "He was bad. We killed him." She looked over at Will. "My new brothers and I."

Will smiled back at her.

"Oh." Rubbing his face with one of his hands, Hopper said, "So tell me what else I missed."

~*~

Jonathan pulled into the driveway, glad to be home after four straight hours of driving. Steve had finally been released from the hospital first thing that morning. The last time they'd been at home was Saturday, and it was already Thursday. Thanksgiving.

Nothing was open because of the holiday, so they were going to have to make do with whatever food was in the freezer for Thanksgiving Dinner. At least they weren't trying to celebrate the holiday in the hospital.

Jonathan looked in the rearview mirror at Nancy and Steve. He definitely had some things to be thankful for this year. 

Steve turned and opened his own door, earning cries from everyone else in the car, Jonathan included.

" _Wait_ for me to come help," Jonathan insisted, taking his keys from the engine and hurrying around to the other side to help Steve out of the car.

"It's just bruised ribs," Steve insisted, but he let Jonathan help him. Looking up at the house, he asked, "Did we leave all those lights on?"

"I don't think so," Nancy said, sharing a look with Joyce.

Before Jonathan could freak out too badly, the front door opened and Will was standing there. "Welcome home!"

Joyce laughed. "You're supposed to be in Hawkins, young man!"

"We wanted it to be a surprise." Will hopped down the stairs, looking happier than he had since before the move. He took Joyce's good hand and said, "Come on!"

Jonathan kept pace with Steve, so they were a few seconds later through the door than the others. Then Jonathan stopped in the doorway, almost unable to believe what he was seeing. Among the crowd gathered in their now-decorated living and dining room, stood Hopper, _alive_. 

He looked skinnier and a little rough with a cut on his eyebrow, but it was definitely him. 

Hopper held out his arms, eyes fixed on Joyce, and said, "Surprise!"

"What?" Joyce asked, looking around the room. All of Will and El's friends were there, and Robin, too.

El took a few steps forward. "It's okay, Mom," she said. "I found him. We brought him home."

With a hysterical little laugh, Joyce started crying. She stumbled toward Hopper and hugged him. Everyone cheered. 

Robin came over to them with a smile, saying, "Hey, dingus. I managed to talk your boss into catering the meal. I'd say you owe me one, but I think after everything that happened this week, we can call it square."

Steve laughed and gave Robin a gentle hug. "Thanks. I'm starving."

"Then let's dig in!"

~*~

**_June 1986_ **

"Byers, Jonathan!"

Five loud voices in the audience whooped and cheered. Jonathan tried not to blush or trip as he walked across the stage.

The principal handed him his diploma and shook Jonathan's hand, and then that was it! He'd graduated high school.

After the ceremony ended, Jonathan found his family. He got a handshake from Hop, and hugs from everyone else. Then Joyce caught Jonathan and said, "Now, okay. Before you kids drive off, I want a family picture."

Jonathan groaned, but he let his mother arrange them all before pressing Mr. Nelson, Jonathan's Literature teacher, into taking a few shots of them. Jonathan stood between Steve and Will, with Hopper sort of behind Will, and Joyce and El in front of them. 

He hoped the prints were going to turn out well. This was a memory he wanted to keep.

"Okay," Will said with a grin for Joyce. "Can we go _now_?"

Joyce gave Hopper a look. He shrugged, so Joyce turned back to the four of them. "Okay, you can go!" As they raced toward the parking lot, Steve pulling a little ahead, Joyce called after them, "Drive safe! Call me when you get there!"

Turning around, Jonathan waved at her. "Okay, Mom!"

He ended up being the last to reach Steve's already-packed car, but by privilege of being the driver's boyfriend, he still got shotgun. El and Will piled into the back and they managed to get out of the school parking lot before it got jammed with families leaving.

Smiling over at Steve, Jonathan put the new mixed tape he'd made special for the occasion into the tape deck and pressed play. With sunny skies above them and the music blaring, they drove back to Hawkins.

The graduation party at the Wheelers' place was in full swing by the time they got there. Will and El immediately ran through the house for the basement stairs. Jonathan and Steve, on the other hand, set out looking for the guest of honor.

They found her chatting with Robin and some of the Wheeler cousins. As soon as she saw them, she dropped everything, running over and hugging both Steve and Jonathan at the same time.

Jonathan wanted nothing more than to kiss her, but he would feel bad doing so when Steve couldn't. So, he settled for kissing Nancy's cheek and murmuring in her ear. "Just ten more weeks."

"Until we're living in the same city again, I know!" Nancy cried, hugging Jonathan more fully when Steve broke off to say hello to Robin.

"Jonathan!" Karen Wheeler said, coming over and giving him a hug once Nancy released him. "I hear congratulations are in order. Nancy tells me you got a scholarship to UIC."

"I did," he replied, thinking about the photography portfolio he'd submitted back before Christmas. One of his favorite shots had been a close-up of Nancy's shoulder with Steve's lips pressed to it. Apparently the scholarship judges had liked it as well. He wasn't so sure Nancy's mom would feel the same if she knew. Changing the topic, he said, "Nancy's so excited about Northwestern."

"We're very proud of her," Karen insisted. Her eyes tracking someone past Jonathan's shoulder, she added, "Nancy tells me Steve also got into UIC?"

"Yeah," Jonathan told her. "It's really great. We're gonna share an apartment, save our money over living in the dorm."

Karen's look was a little judgy, but she still smiled and said, "Well, that will be nice, having another friend in town."

"That's what I'm hoping, yeah," he said, scratching the back of his head and wondering how the hell to get out of this conversation.

Luckily, Nancy saved him, saying, "You have to try some of these little finger foods."

As they walked over to the table of food, Jonathan told Nancy, "I'm pretty sure your mom knows me and Steve aren't just roommates."

"She likes to know a lot more than she lets on," Nancy told him. "Don't worry about it."

Trusting her judgement on the matter, Jonathan crowded close to Nancy and kissed her neck. "How long do you think we should stay before we go check into the hotel?"

"We’ll go soon," she assured him, loading up a plate and handing it to him. "Very, very soon."

"I like the sound of that," Steve said, reaching past Jonathan to grab a little sandwich before stuffing it whole into his mouth. After Jonathan gave him a look, Steve asked, "What?"

"For a kid raised in a country club family, you have the worst manners."

Steve laughed and grabbed another sandwich with his fingers. "Sorry. Spent too much time living in your house," he said with a grin. "I've got Byers manners now." He shoved that sandwich into his mouth too.

For such a disgusting sight, it sure made Jonathan feel loved.

"Oh, I think my parents are starting their tour of the new side patio," Nancy said, grabbing Jonathan by the hand. "If we go now, they probably won't miss me for at least an hour."

"I can work with that," Jonathan assured her, eager to get her someplace more private. "Steve?"

Steve pulled his keys out of his pocket and rattled them. "C'mon. Let's go!"

**Author's Note:**

> And that's the end of this installment! Thanks for reading and commenting!
> 
> Next up is a one-shot, "Zenith", followed by another long shot, "Lodestar." Remember to subscribe to the "Mr. Sandman" series to get all the updates!
> 
> You can find me on [tumblr](https://pterawaters.tumblr.com/) and [pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.social/pterawaters).


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